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LG Thinq linqs your smart appliances with WiFi and smartphone apps
LG just exhausted 1,000 words to announce its new range of smart appliances built around Thinq technology. Unfortunately, for all the hyperbole there's not much detail about the appliances themselves. We do know that Thinq features smart grid, access, diagnosis, adapt, and food management capabilities. At the center of Thinq is the concept of an intelligent WiFi grid built around a smart meter enabling home owners to schedule the oven cook time, washing machine cycle, and refrigerator defrost at the most cost-effective or convenient times. Smart Access allows homeowners to control and monitor appliances from outside of the home and, better yet, control LG's HOM-BOT robotic vacuum cleaner to clean or remotely view the house and even feed the dog. LG's smart refrigerators can count and display the number of times the door is opened and alert home owners when the door is ajar. Alerts can also be scheduled when the ice-maker is switched off or the washing machine is off balance or a load is finished. LCD displays on LG's Thinq appliances show daily, weekly, or monthly reports detailing each appliance's energy consumption. Naturally, you can access daily totals from your smartphone or tablet as well. New Smart Diagnosis features include downloadable diagnostic information and the ability to hit a few buttons on the appliance to emit a series of tones to assist LG technicians troubleshooting problems over the phone. The food management feature works by dragging and dropping food icons around the LCD display or by using built-in voice recognition. Unfortunately, the inventory must be managed manually making this feature pretty useless for all but the most obsessive of home owners. All the appliances are software upgradeable with the ability to download new features like pre-programmed recipes and advanced wash cycles. It all sounds very intriguing but we'll have to see it demonstrated live before we're convinced of its usefulness. Until then we've got a few pics of the user interface and one of washer and dryer pair in the gallery below. %Gallery-112418%
Belkin's Conserve Gateway checks in with the FCC, may be at your utility company
Belkin just got official with its Converse Gateway wireless energy monitoring system earlier this month, and already it looks to be making a beeline to your local utility company. As the temperatures drop and energy use skyrockets, this here setup is designed to attach to a smart meter on the exterior of your home and beam information about usage to your PC (in a nutshell, anyway). Any smart device that's connected in your home can be listed in the UI, giving you a heads-up as to what youngster is burnin' up the most juice when you leave on business for the weekend. Per usual, a stop by the FCC's database generally signals a near-term release in the US of A, with Wireless Goodness suggesting that these are already starting to pop up around the country. Though, you'll have to phone up your local energy company to inquire about a professional installation -- we don't get the impression that these are going to be stocked at Wally World.
Belkin Conserve Gateway will track your whole home energy usage, confuse this guy
We're not sure exactly what Kevin Ashton is looking to find inside the back of the Belkin Conserve Gateway he's holding. As General Manager for the division that produced it, he should know quite well what it is: a sort of wireless gateway that connects your smart meter and smart appliances to your network, letting you capture your whole-home energy usage in real-time. Earlier entries in the Belkin Conserve line allowed you to track and manage individual devices, but this new gateway uses ZigBee to talk to your meter and compatible devices, then turns around and pumps that information to a "cloud-based device management system." Belkin hasn't shown us any interface shots yet, so we don't know exactly how that information will be presented, but we're assured it will be easy to understand -- even for corporate executives who confuse Ethernet ports with kaleidoscopes. %Gallery-103947%
4Home, Marvell partner for energy monitoring plug computer
If you asked Intel what this is, the company would tell you it's an experimental power sensor; if you asked a storage guru, they'd ID it as the PogoPlug. Truth be told, it's a miniature Linux computer designed by Marvell -- who's apparently decided to beat Intel at the former function. Through a partnership with 4Home, Marvell's latest 2GHz SheevaPlug will become a smart meter that measures power consumption right from the outlet, ostensibly allowing you to figure out which blasted light the kids left on this time without shoving a pricey home automation kit into your walls. No word on how much it'll cost to keep tabs on your energy bill or when you'll be able to do it, but we'll ask those important questions and more when we see the device for ourselves later this week. PR after the break.
Microsoft unveils Hohm beta for overanalyzing your home energy usage
Since Google can't be the only multibillion-dollar technology company having all the home energy monitoring fun, Microsoft's jumping in with "Hohm" -- like a portmanteau of "Home" and "Ohm," get it? We're not entirely sure just how it works yet, but according to the company, using both user input / feedback and analytics licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy, the program provides suggestions for energy conservation. However, it's the future uses we're more excited about -- eventually, you'll be able to upload energy usage data into the system automatically, provided you're getting voltage from one of the partner companies. First West Coast utilities to join up include Puget Sound Energy, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, and Xcel Energy, and nope, none of those overlap with PowerMeter's first enlistees. The sign-up page for the beta is now live, so hit up the read link if you want a chance to participate.[Via Yahoo! Tech]
GE developing smart appliances: the future just got a bit less interesting
You know, the future used to be so much cooler before we gave up on our dreams of flying cars. Now instead of powering jet engines, it looks like our automobiles will power household appliances, and household appliances will use technologies like GE's SmartMeter to communicate with the local power grid. This could lead to such sexy contrivances as refrigerators that wait until off-peak hours to run the automatic defrost cycle, and (in coordination with tiered pricing for electricity and some new energy storage options) a bit of relief from the old fossil fuels. Maybe this is not exactly the stuff of William Gibson novels, but to hear more about "Energy Management Enabled Appliances" go ahead and hit that read link.
