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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."
My fridge better not negotiate its way out of cold beer at 7pm.
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.
I for one, welcome our ice cube dispensing overlords
Fridges are fairly low power devices with naturally random and uncorrelated cycling. One would think that in any given neighborhood, the normal randomness of the many fridges' cycling would be sufficient to result in a fairly level electrical "base load". I can't see that enforcing the levelness of this distribution could actually offer very much of a reduction in the peak load on the grid. What causes excessive peak loading is the coordinated use of many high-power loads. Typically this is air conditioning in the summer - all the units run simultaneously because it's hot outside, and each unit draws about 50 times more power than a fridge. Clothes dryers and washing machines in the evening also do this to a lesser extent. In the grand scheme of things, I really don't think there's much room for improvement through load-leveling of just fridges.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
This probably isn't pitched at householders. I think it would be great for supermarkets, cold warehouses, booze shops, chemical plants etc... people who need commercial/industrial levels of refrigeration.
You would be surprised. A lot of people keep a second fridge (or, more often, a second freezer) in their garage or basement. There are also small "dorm" fridges that people use to keep beer, soda, whatever handy.
We've been joking about it for years, but we finally have an answer for the ages-old question of "why would I need an IP address for my fridge?"
Now, we just need some compelling reasons for networked sinks, sponges, cutlery, and microwaves. Not Talking Toasters though. They'd keep us on IPv4 for another decade.
I had a similar idea, but more general.
Those are not flying fridges - yet.
And it is quite obvious that should there be a nuclear war fridges would be the only things to survive.
Indiana Jones taught me that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If you extend it this could actually be useful...
Imagine you have a wind generator on your roof and several appliances connected. If the generator can't power all the devices simultaneously then they could negotiate with each other to smooth out the demand.
eg. If I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea the fridge could switch itself off for a couple of minutes. If I step in the shower all power can be diverted to the water heater, etc.
On a larger scale, smoothing out the demand could avoid building power entire power stations. This probably won't happen for the next 100 years, but one day it will.
No sig today...
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.
If I step in the shower all power can be diverted to the water heater, etc.
But what about the forward deflector shields?
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Well, there's a big difference between lab simulations and real-world trials. The previous paragraph suggests the largest trial they've done with real equipment consisted of seven small fridges and three larger industrial-sized coolrooms.
Also, it's not intended for single locations but rather for "every house in the city". There's little to be gained by smoothing out the energy usage of individual locations, even rather large locations.
Let's give every appliance a connection to the Internet!
Do you really want your Fridge wasting all day on Slashdot?
Smivs on the intertubes!
Yep ... I was going to put in a Star Trek reference but that would just have been karma-whoring.
No sig today...
How does a post where it is clear that the poster didn't RTFA get modded insightful?
Moderators never RTFA either.
I'd highly recommend going with INSTEON, or building your own custom modules that use WiFi to communicate instead of the powerline. Not many houses have more than 254 outlets in them, so you'd only need a Class C of private address space for your house. I'm not sure if 254 outlets/devices can connect to a single 802.11g/n access point though.
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.
Why yes, yes it is pitched at residential AND commercial sites. This is what "Lonworks" from Echelon is all about - energy management. The technology wasn't designed for just fridges, it was designed for EVERYTHING. Lighting, heating/cooling, dishwashers, laundry, etc. With its 64 bit addressing, it is intended to allow everything to communicate, and peer communications is a big part of it (as is negotiating when to "run".)
Anyway, these researchers should talk to Echelon. They solved this problem 12 years ago.
Yep ... I was going to put in a Star Trek reference but that would just have been karma-whoring.
Funny mods don't give you karma unless that's been changed recently. In fact you usually wind up losing karma because of the jackasses that like to hit every joke they don't get with an overrated mod.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Fridges as we know them are pretty sad contraptions with no shortage of room for improvement. They put a whopping big heat source under the chamber they're trying to keep cool. They use room air from the hottest part of the house, even though in most homes that room is a foot or two away from outside air that is much cooler, if not actually even cooler than the fridge interior should be. In general, they're an agglomeration of kluges and marketroid idiocies. So yeah, this could be a key part of a rethinking of what a fridge is and how it works that could eventually cut power usage by as much as eighty to ninety percent. The same could be said of quite a lot of appliances and HVAC components. Hell, done right, we now know that comfortable homes can be built that require no conventional heating or cooling systems at all.
Kinda makes you wonder why we're supposed to need this "smart grid" for all this massive increased demand we supposedly have no way to avoid, doesn't it?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You might as well start with a spherical cow.
Humans are not random operators, especially in industrialized societies. Spikes can come in as little as fifteen to twenty seconds in a society like ours. Rush hour starts and within fifteen minutes you starts seeing a wave spreading away from centers of workplaces of air conditioners being turned on or up and lights going on as people get home. The Superbowl starts and everybody comes indoors from the barbeque to watch the game, air conditioners get turned up as the patio doors get shut. Ad breaks come and toilets all across the area flush within thirty seconds of each other all over the time zone. A big audience tv show has whispering or something else quiet and air conditioners get turned off so people can hear what's on screen.
We live in a society where most people get up around the same time, go about the same distances, stay away for about the same durations, and come back in to do the same damn things as big chunks of their neighbors for hundreds of miles around. And some of these things, like rushes during ad breaks or when a popular show ends have noticable peaks and drops that can be measured in tens of seconds. This doesn't even get into things like what happens when all the living soil is replaced with pavement and, for example, stormwater load spikes get much higher and then drop off much faster. And then, with all that water moving faster everywhere, again more people turn devices on and off to deal with the consequences.
No averages have nothing much to do with such demand at all.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
What's your point? There are thousands of things that people "could" do that they don't. They could superinsulate their homes with dirt, straw, and a few weekend days. They could teach their kids the basics of astronomy in an afternoon or two. They could all show up at the polling place and vote for every single election. Hell, we could all build cantennas and have free wireless in every city in the world by the end of this week.
Reality isn't about what people in theory could do. It's about what they will do. And out here in the real world less than one percent of the population has the skills to do what you're suggesting and less than one percent of that one percent actually might. No comparison to a plan like this, not even taking into account the fundamental issues of determining protocols and load calculations.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
There's little to be gained by smoothing out the energy usage of individual locations, even rather large locations.
My first thought was this would be useful if you're forced to run on a backup generator for a while; This sort of system would allow a supermarket or a largish home to run a smaller margin by not having to worry about every compressor kicking on at once. This would allow a smaller generator, and generators run more efficiently the closer they are to their max capability.
After the fridge protocol it shouldn't be too hard to come up with other cooperative units - pumps, even a monitor on other circuits so that when the washing machine is running the fridges try to avoid coming on.
On power district scales, there's already off-peak systems for things like electric water heaters. 240V@23-27A beats 120V@5A anytime, you know?
I don't read AC A human right
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.
Living in Canada where it is -25 outside right now, I have always found it an extreme waste of energy to be powering a fridge and freezer to keep things cold in a house I am paying out the nose to heat because it is so cold outside for 1/3 of the year or more.
How come new houses aren't built with some kind of a "chill pipe", kind of like an insulated duct line that routes outside air directly into the kitchen, that could be connected to the fridge? The pipe could be automatically closed or opened as the fridge detected the temperature outside.
That seems like energy conservation taken to a ridiculous extreme to me.
A model like this means that the people who use the most power pay for the production of those new energy generation facilities that you love so well, while those able to curtail their energy usage are rewarded by being charged less. It is essentially the only logical model. When we build a power plant in the USA, it costs ALL taxpayers some money, even if we live off-grid, because of bullshit subsidies and other nonsense.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
He's probably just got a really old fridge. He should probably go to Sears and get a new Kenmore fridge. They are on sale this week.
***this message was created by the Kenmore Energy Star Net+AI 21.7 Cu. Ft. Refrigerator***
Um, they have exactly that... The PP was just being flamebait. Of COURSE you wouldn't want lights being turned off on you when you are in the room.
But here is the deal.... You really don't want someone else telling you when you can run your own stuff. What you want is things like "we have a peak load time, do what you can to conserve" and YOUR controller starts taking measures to do extra conservation based on your individual needs. Likewise, "we have a surplus, rates are lower right now" so run the dishwasher, etc. You can also do some time-sliced sync of compressors (not just fridges, but AC units too, but if you look at this on a grid-wide basis it's going to even out anyway. Better is to let your fridge warm a couple extra degrees (if your situation allows) during peak load times (not running AT ALL for a while.)
Going forward, we all need to do what we can to save / manage energy more efficiently. Let's use alternative energy sources "green power" to cut down on legacy power generation, cutting pollution, while at the same time cutting energy consumption to reduce need for legacy power even more.
more than 50% of my electricity usage was going towards making food lukewarm.
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