Why Intel Wants To Network Your Clothes Dryer 330
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."
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't that a lot of the point of the smart grid?
I should be able to say, "Dry my clothes in the next 4 hours or when the unit price for power drops below $0.07"
Re:Now how about... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:only if the government mandates it (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen some new hotels with some interesting energy saving stuff.. If it doesn't sense anyone in the room, it shuts off the heat/AC, turns off lights, TV, etc.
Personally, I would love something like that at home, or just a big frickin red button near each door to the house (especially the door to the garage) that would kill all non-essential outlets in the house, turn off lights (except maybe one or two on a timer) and knock the thermostat down (or up in summer)
Why is Intel working on this at the power supply side. It would seem to be much smarter to do this from the breaker box panel, (and those are actually pretty easy to replace/swap. You have the total house draw right there on the mains, and could monitor the load on each breaker going out. Define the "non-essential" ones, and then turn them off easily. All in one place. Breaker boxes haven't had much technology improvement since they upgraded from little glass fuses...
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pumped storage schemes can store power (pump water uphill, to fill the reservoir used by a hydroelectric power plant).
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says it's used for 2.5% and 5% of electricity generation in the US and EU respectively.
CurrentCost meters (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in the UK we're seeing a lot of devices that you place around the incoming electricity feed (via a loop you put around the cable) that has a wireless transmitter to a LCD display of current overall power usage (and some historical stats). They're quite cool, some can be connected to your PC, like the CurrentCost Envi [currentcost.com]. The idea is you can see how much power those hungry devices use as you see the meter spike up when you turn them on.
The government has set a policy for monitoring meters, and the electricity companies (and Sky TV for some reason) are offering subsidised units (I got mine cheap off ebay from someone who had one of these).
You can get these things in the US and Australia/NZ [currentcost.co.uk] too, and even Google is getting involved as these things will upload to Google Powermeter [google.com].
So, adding a wireless usage transmitter to every plug sounds expensive (but cool) but it wouldn't provide that much more information than you can get currently. However, the CurrentCost devices talk to each other (and you can set up multiple meters) so if their comms protocol was a standard (it might be, they advertise it as C2), then additional transmitters could fit into an existing power-usage network without fuss.
Re:only if the government mandates it (Score:3, Interesting)
Some electricity companies in the UK have sent digital power meters to customers -- the one my parents received has a large LCD showing the total power use for the home (in watts). The display is portable, the sensor is wrapped around the main power cable.
(I think they're forced to send them to some people to encourage energy efficiency.)
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Have a physical power switch AND let every device have a clock......that gets set by radio time sources [wikipedia.org] and stores time zone in non-volatile memory.
Have your cake, and eat it too.
Or each device could utilize a normally-open relay for power switching.
Your DVR can record a show, then open the relay when finished.
Press one button to turn your microwave on, then enter the cooking time. When it's finished, the relay opens.
Sure, it will add to the cost of the device. But if the 15% is accurate for your household, the additional device cost will be made up in no time at all.
MIT's done this for years (Score:2, Interesting)
So, basically they're working on an advanced (or, if you feel you must call it this way, "overcomplicated") version of MIT's Random Hall Laundry Server [mit.edu]? Are we going to see an advanced version of the Bathroom Server [mit.edu] next?
Old news (Score:1, Interesting)
I did this back in the early 1980's using a Radio Shack TRS-80 model1 and an X10 interface. Power consumption came from the manufacturer's specs, and placed in a lookup table. It had a homemade clock chip which allowed the correct time to be set even if power glitched. Also had a Hayes auto answer modem setup so I could dial my TRS-80 from work and check the status of things or alter the X10 schedule, like "Taking spouse out to dinner after work, so set bedroom air conditioner to come on at 7:30 p.m. instead of 4:00 p.m.". All this running in the background so I could run basic programs at the same time. Wasn't wireless, but I didn't need to run any wires for it - for communication the X10 system sent a carrier on the household AC wiring.
Re:CurrentCost meters (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is the stinker: It tells me that the cooker (hob and oven) and the TV use the most power in the house. duh.
Okay, so your largest draws are things you can't (or don't want to) reduce. Does that mean you should just give up? Why not spend some time looking at other areas to see if you can reduce your usage by a few percent?
The vampires are real (Score:4, Interesting)
The "vampire power" thing is a bit overrated, actually.
No, it isn't.
Switching power supplies, like good quality cell phone chargers and laptop power supplies generally use almost no power when they're not under load. At least, the ones in my house don't. I know this because...
I installed a Brultech ECM-1240 [etherbee.com] on my house's breaker panel. It has current taps around the main feed, and several other house circuits, like the kitchen outlets, furnace (which also works as my a/c blower in the summer), etc. It sends the data over IP to a low power PC (6W, thanks to a low power CPU and SSD) which stores it in a database and generates graphs you can view in a web browser (unfortunately using a Flash applet).
The software was, to put it mildly, complicated to set up. Seriously. It's not quite a finished product, and it has a few gotchas that prevent it from working until you figure out the mindset of the person who hacked it together. Once it's working, it's pretty neat though.
So, what did I find?
The powered subwoofer in the living room uses 10W when it's in "Standby" mode. It's now wired to a relay connected to my receiver's switched outlet, so it's never on unless the receiver is also on.
The PS3 wakes itself up at all times of the night - oh, you think it's off, but it's nowhere near off. It'll wake up for whatever nefarious reason whenever the hell it wants to and then it stays on until you turn it off again - all the time using about 150W continuously. I wanted to watch Bluray movies, not heat the room all night, thanks. I turn off it's power switch (on the rear of the unit) after I shut it down now.
The Apple TV uses 30W all the time - ok, this is Apple's fault, I think. There's no power switch, and I don't think there's even an option to shut it down. I just unplug it, which is inconvenient since we use the Airtunes function a lot.
I've even found some things that aren't really vampire power, but are what I call bugs and inefficiencies:
The color laser printer upstairs decided one day that sleep mode means "run all your motors and keep the fuser warm for no apparent reason." Averaging about 350W continuously (we don't use the upstairs of the house much, so it went unnoticed until I came home and saw the power usage chart. Reset the printer and all is well so far.
The basement dehumidifier was going through defrost cycles very frequently. You could see them as a sawtooth on top of the main power use graph. I took the machine apart, washed the coils and replaced some insulation that had fallen off one of the refrigerant lines. Power use dropped by about 50W and the defrost cycles happen much further apart.
Anyhow, I guess my main point is that your house is probably full of power wasting appliances, but unless you know what's going on, you'll never find them. Except the laser printer - I heard that one when I went into the room it's in.
You don't need anything as complicated as my setup, just something that will record the power usage (or even just current) coming in on your main power feed. It's really helpful though to know when things are going wrong.
Looking at the graph, I can see big things like the house a/c, the garage door opener, etc., but also small things - in the winter I could see the 8W used by the furnace's gas valve as it cycled the burners on and off, and I can see the 3W from the solenoid valve in the fridge when someone gets a glass of water from the dispenser on the fridge door.