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Why Intel Wants To Network Your Clothes Dryer
An anonymous reader writes "Intel has shown off a working prototype of a small box that, among other things, can monitor your clothes dryer to see how much it's contributing to your power bill. The Intelligent Home Energy Management proof-of-concept device is a small box with an 11.56-inch OLED touchscreen that is designed to act as an electronic dashboard for monitoring energy use in the home. By equipping devices like home entertainment systems and clothes dryers with wireless networked power adapters, the system can actually report back the power draw for a particular power point. Leave the house, and it can make sure power-draining devices like that plasma TV are turned off. It is unlikely the device will enter production (there are apparently only four in existence), however this story about the box shows something we can expect to see in the home of tomorrow. Ultimately, it's not only about saving money, but also reducing load on the electricity grid by removing needless power use."
...they come up with a way to detect that monster that keeps eating my fucking socks. I'm sick and tired of wearing mismatching socks! DAMMIT, FIND THAT BASTARD!!!
Living With a Nerd
Now i know what "Intel Inside" really meant. Bastards.
I signed up for PowerSmart Pricing for free. Which has hourly rates instead of a monthly flat rate. I've cut a good chunk of my bill by shifting most electricity to off hours.
Coupled with a free eSmart programmable thermostat. I can set temperatures from the internet. I also have it setup to kill my AC during peak hours. I did have to give them ability to kill my AC remotely, however 1) I'm not home anyway. 2) It's only 6 times between June and September. Meaning all of 2 days per week.
I'd love to figure out the protocol that it uses and set up some scripting, but for now it works.
Initial cost out of pocket: $0
Savings per month: $20-$50 (compared to previous year)
I know a way we could save at least 15% of energy usage in the USA right now:
mandate that all appliances (DVD players, TV's, etc) had an actual, PHYSICAL POWER SWITCH rather than being electrical vampires.
There's no reason every fucking device on the planet has to have a goddamn clock, and much less that it needs to eat more than 2 watts 24/7 just to wait for a power-on signal from some lazy fatass who can't stand up and walk 8 feet from the couch to turn it on.
I work in the AMI/ Smart Grid field and I am just finishing up a study on HAN devices for a municipality. This is the way to go, with a ZigBee enabled device to communicate with power monitoring adapters that all of your electrical loads plug into. If it also supported an internet LAN connection back up to the utility AMI MMS (meter management system) it could incorporate the latest billing rate information and any data collected from the AMI meter outside the house.
There are some solutions out there that are closed-proprietary but I believe that a standards-based solution is the right way to go. HAN needs to get to the point where you can go into your local home improvement store and buy devices that can associate to a central device. Right now the price-point is too high at around $100 a device and it can cost $300-$400 to equip a home with a IHD (in home dislay), programmable thermostat and a communications gateway.
I hope that Intel can apply pressure to the marketplace so this technology can become ubiquitous.
Tisha Hayes
The "vampire power" thing is a bit overrated, actually. It's worth having standards for new appliances limiting their offline current draw, but the amount of energy savings to be had doesn't come anywhere near 15% of our electricity use. Not even close. Home electronics themselves only use 7ish percent of our total electricity. See here
To the GP: yes that's the idea of the smart grid.
And in general it is pretty pathetic that Zigbee or X25 or even out-of-band ethernet or RS232 power strips and power meters continue to be products that are only sold at a premium to professional IT/ISP departments or home automation boutiques. The meters and the power switches themselves are all dirt cheap, and the network interfaces are also really cheap to add. I mean, look at the price of 5-port ethernet switches and tr to tell yourself adding a port or radio to a deivice like this is going to be "prohibitively expensive". It just does not make sense.
But these have always been products that cannot sell on the shelf at Home Depot. The best you can get is a dedicated lightswitch/lamp pair that uses a proprietary "protocol." As sad as that is, it's "progress" compared to several years ago when even that was not available.
Anyway, I suppose I'm going to have to watch a slow motion trainwreck of companies trying to proprietizesmart grid initiatives in the coming decades. Sigh.
Someone had to do it.
I seem to get extra socks out of my dryer. They must be yours. Gimme your address and I'll send them to you.
Sure, it sounds good to be able to monitor...however, I'm afraid that it might become mandated that everyone would have to have a monitoring device, and the govt gets to tell you when you can do what, and what temp your house can be, etc.
With the feds (and some states) poking their noses into private citizens' lives more and more...I see this as one more thing coming. Hell, sounds like one hell of a rider to attach to the cap and trade bills going through right now.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
mandate that all appliances (DVD players, TV's, etc) had an actual, PHYSICAL POWER SWITCH rather than being electrical vampires [sciencedaily.com].
There's no reason every fucking device on the planet has to have a goddamn clock, and much less that it needs to eat more than 2 watts 24/7 just to wait for a power-on signal from some lazy fatass who can't stand up and walk 8 feet from the couch to turn it on.
Horse shit horse shit horse shit horse shit.
Buy a Kill-A-Watt
Measure the actual power consumption of your devices in standby mode
Find that they're all immeasurably close to 0
I have a wide variety of chargers, adapters, power strips, surge protectors, AV gear, gaming systems, etc. None of them draw so much as a single watt of power when in standby mode.
The claims that I need to buy a smart power strip to shut off my array of chargers, or that governments need to mandate that devices come with GREEN FEATURE #246187 is utter horse shit.
You claim at least 15%.
Show me the fucking numbers, measured from appliances in your house. I've measured my shit, and I know these claims are lies.
You want to ACTUALLY conserve energy use?
Fix your insulation. The vast majority of homes in the US and the world have shitty, shitty insulation.
Beyond that, yes, I want every device to have a physical power switch. Why? Because I like having physical control over my shit.