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Networked Fridges 'Negotiate' Electricity Use
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have developed a way to network household and commercial fridges together in a distributed peer-to-peer fashion that lets them 'negotiate' with each other on the best time to consume electricity. A retrofittable controller is attached to each fridge and then a temperature profile is built around the unit. The controller enables communication between other fridges on the network and also the power source. It enables fridges to work together to decide when to cool down, and thus consume power, based on how much surplus power will be available, and to anticipate power shortages and change their running schedules accordingly to use as little power as possible during these times."
The first hack for those fridges should be a power hog : a fridge that tries to steal as much power as possible from the other fridges. In any cooperative, some will try not to cooperate.
Lab simulations have shown the technology is capable of supporting 10,000 or more networked units, but West said a commercial partner was needed to enable the CSIRO to conduct a larger scale, real-world trial.
Isn't 10,000 already a pretty large scale? I can't imagine very many real-world commercial entities using more than that in one location.
I had a similar idea, but more general.
Well it's not going to do anything to reduce an individual household's power usage; certainly nothing that couldn't be done with non-networked smart fridges, anyway. Most people just pay for the amount of energy they use; it doesn't matter if they consume it in large bursts or as a constant trickle.
This is intended for whole suburbs or cities to be able to regulate the energy draw from cooling fridges so as to decrease peak levels of demand. The other main thrust seems to be regarding renewable energy sources, in particular solar. The idea is that if cloud cover decreases the amount of energy being produced, the plants can tell the fridges and they can intelligently decrease their collective power draw. When the sun's out in full blaze and there's plenty of power being produced, the fridges can cool their interiors by an extra degree or two, effectively storing that additional energy to help them weather a shortage later on.
Air conditioning seems another obvious target for this technology, since most aircons cool for a while (using lots of power) and then just ran the fan (using little power) until the room heats up a bit, then they cool again. If you have 500,000 aircons all doing this, there's a good chance the power station is going to see big surges in energy draw. If they're all talking to each other, they could negotiate their cycles to place a more consistent draw on the power source, flattening out the peak.
Of course, I have no idea just how much fluctuation is common in the energy draw at our power stations, and whether this is a practical thing to pursue or just a really cool, clever idea with minimal practical applications.
More's to the point, why would you need an EXTERNAL IP just for your coffee machine ?
Connect your appliances on a traditional network, then map the 10.0.0.* addresses to ports on a single external IP ?
It's one thing for you to talk to your fridge from the car, but quite another to start dealing with inter-appliance politics ... "Dave, the toaster oven is being nasty to me and stealing all my power again".
Why is this marked as troll? Any one with a $70 embedded PC, high amperage relay, and a temperature probe could do this in a few hours. This would only be interesting if a) all fridges used a standardized negotiation protocol b) it was extended to all high usage appliances.
Fridges are fairly low power devices .......
no, fridges are not fairly low power devices that use quite alot of power .
fridges are heat pumps to pump all that heat you need a large amount of electricity if you could turn off the fridge for a few minutes a day you would save on power bills.
an example of power usage http://www.pmb.co.nz/power_usage.htm
now if you were a business and had say a large freezer and some refrigerated display cases and these devices were "smart" enough to turn themselves on and off at certain times of the day I bet you could save a large amount of money.
why not simply make higher efficiency fridges? I was able to convert a chest freezer into a fridge that uses about 1/4 the energy that the best performing energy star fridge can do. It works great.
all they need to do is increase the insulation in current fridges and improve the door seals. that alone would make a HUGE improvement. Granted I get an added benefit from not having a door that empties the fridge of all it's cold air every time it's opened, but the biggest gains are from the seal and 6" of insulation all around it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's easy to fix as a homeowner if you take the effort and are not a slave to the "fashon police" or are a style freak.
http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.pdf
to change a chest freezer to a incredibly high efficiency fridge.
and simply locating the fridge with a ductwork system to use cooler basement air to circulate around the waste heat coils is not hard to do.
It's simply the fault that most homeowners know nothing about a home or construction and cant instruct the contractor, that wants to do as little as possible, what to do.
It's our culture of ignorance and apathy that propagates the really low efficiency appliances.. People dont shop for how efficient it is, they shop for how pretty and shiny and if it will match my paisley countertops!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Another measure that works well this time of year (in northern climes, anyway). Fill old bottles with tap water (plastic soda or water bottles works well). Don't fill them all the way, perhaps about 80%, then squeeze out the air and cap them.
Set them outside overnight and allow them to freeze. Place them in the fridge and viola! you've just added some really cold mass to your fridge. When the bottles have thawed, set them back outside to freeze. This is like an old-fashioned ice box, and will reduce the amount that the fridge needs to work to keep the interior cold.
I suggest using small bottles, = 1 L, so that they freeze and thaw more quickly, and so that the amount of ice in the fridge can be adjusted as food is added and removed from the fridge.
I'm the original AC who posted above.
3KW is enough, there's a retired person in my condo that has the table saw and he uses it without hassle.
While I agree that's a low threshold, that encourages the makers of the devices to care about energy consumption, level the peak curve when they turn on, etc. To be honest there is a tolerance to support the demand peaks (of turning on devices), I believe it's something like 200W more for few seconds (I think for 10 seconds) before the power meter disconnects you, because old fridges and freezers have a significant peak when the motor goes on.
I have lived in the US for one year and is clear that there is way less care to energy saving devices than in Europe (recently things are changing there too - the "green" is becoming cool). Even the houses are rarely thermally insulated - just a collection of walls and a roof tho keep your house separated from the outside, in some way - so that the cooling/heating bill is higher than it should be.
That's also caused by way cheaper electricity rates in US than EU (I think it was something like 50-60% less in US than Italy - I pay an average of 0,2â/KWh), and that applies to gas, cooking gas (methane, CH4) and probably water as well.
and, btw, keep the room temp to 80F and you'll save a lot on your bill. I got 101F flu because of AC running at 71 (in August!). :)
Where I live in Switzerland they turn off the power to the hot water heater, washer and dryer every weekday between 11am and 1215. (Supposedly to compensate for everyone cooking lunch at that time.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?