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."

Comments

Cold beer

[pondermaster]

My fridge better not negotiate its way out of cold beer at 7pm.

Re:Cold beer

[Foolicious]

My fridge better not negotiate its way out of cold beer at 7 AM.

There -- fixed that for you.

Re:Cold beer

[necro81]

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.

Re:Won't be useful to many people

[sapphire wyvern]

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.

Re:How does this actually solve a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you didn't RTFA.

It's about renewable energy and making the most of solar/wind. I.e. ensure that excess solar energy is used up during the day by cooling the fridges an extra couple of degrees so they don't have to use base load power over night.

RTFA, you might learn something.

Good idea, but we can do better

[harlows_monkeys]

I had a similar idea, but more general.

1. Each device contains a controller, and the house power distribution center contains a controller. The device controllers and the house controller communicate over the power lines.
2. Devices must get permission from the house controller to consume the power they consume (beyond a minimal amount they are allowed to always consumer to power their controllers and sensors).
3. Devices tell the house how long they will need power, how long they can wait to start, whether they need the power continuously or can pause for a bit if needed, and how much they need. For example, if the fridge needs to start, but can wait a couple minutes, the house might have it wait until the microwave finishes. If the fridge says it can't wait, the house might ask the oven to stop for a a bit so the fridge can have the power to start the compressor.
4. Ideally, the system would be designed so that there is very little voltage and current at the outlet, until a device asks for it. Then the outlet provides the voltage and current that is asked for. Appliances plugged in but not in use would present much less of a shock hazard this way.

Re:Good idea, but we can do better

[ledow]

That's called USB isn't it? :-)

Seriously, it's a good idea but you'll never really manage to standardise it in a way that brings in into an ordinary house ("gadget" houses and those people who already own X10 networks don't really count as "ordinary" users).

What's needed, if you're going to do this, is a universal gadget that does some *very* useful things to the average householder. I would suggest things like... water leak detectors tied into the same system that can shut off the water supply to individual devices, smoke alarms, burglar alarms, entry control, baby monitors (bring the house lights up gradually in the nursery when the baby cries) etc. all tied into the same device. The trouble is that any one facility doesn't really make a killer app and there are individual devices that do each job perfectly but the "universal" device that can demonstrate lots of useful benefits brings far too much cost into the equation (at the moment). Even X10 is prohibitively expensive for simple tasks, but I can buy a pair of remote-RF-controlled 13-amp-switching 220v mains sockets (with remote & 12V battery in every pack) for £5 from my local electronics shop.

I've often looked at automating my house... I have the hardware (opto-isolated I/O boards, relays, spare PC's, tons of logic chips and processors, not to mention cabling, wireless modules, remote sockets, sensors etc.), I have the skills (soldering, wiring, simple logic devices and processors, programming), I even have enough money to do a lot of these things. The problem is that it's much easier and cheaper to just buy a cheap baby monitor, a cheap burglar alarm, a cheap timer, a cheap energy monitor and not let them talk to each other.

However, if we were to establish a real, authenticated standard for automated house control protocols that all of these things could start supporting with a $5 chip plugged in their mains plug, then these systems would build themselves. X10 was supposed to be that, but a quick search for X10 in my country either produces lots of websites without prices at all (scary enough) or things like £50 for a single X10 mains module that then needs controllers, additional modules etc. before anything interesting can really happen (and then it is mostly basic stuff).

It's actually less than half the cost for me to buy my off-the-shelf remote-control socket, rip the remote apart (I get one with every mains module anyway, so I have a big stack of spares), take a wire from the button and plug it into a £20 USB I/O kit from Vellemans and write a bash script to do all the fancy stuff... I can already get temperature, I can already monitor electricity (again, cheaper with a £10 energy monitor from the same shop and either a bit of creative disassembly or a webcam reading the 7-segment digits off it).

This sort of stuff won't go big until there are set standards, that are ubiquitous and start getting included in *everything* (therefore cheap), so that the average homeowner ends up with at least two devices that support it without realising and then thinks "Mmm... these say they can talk together... I wonder what I need to do that?". It's how it worked with Bluetooth... nobody cared or could see the point until you are sitting in your living room with someone else who has Bluetooth and you want to exchange phone numbers etc. When enough people have it to get interest in the general populace (everyone KNOWS you can do this stuff if you have the money), then you can start standardising. But you can't standardise until enough people have it. :-)

Re:Won't be useful to many people

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:Won't be useful to many people

[totally bogus dude]

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.

Re:Won't be useful to many people

[troc]

If I step in the shower all power can be diverted to the water heater, etc.

But what about the forward deflector shields?

Re:10,000 is a lot of fridges...

[totally bogus dude]

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.

Re:What else?

[Smivs]

Let's give every appliance a connection to the Internet!

Do you really want your Fridge wasting all day on Slashdot?

Re:Not insightful.

[xaxa]

How does a post where it is clear that the poster didn't RTFA get modded insightful?

Moderators never RTFA either.

Re:IPv6 Adopters Rejoice

[daveime]

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".

There are quite a few ways to extend functionality

[RustinHWright]

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?

And you fail the reality test again.

[RustinHWright]

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.