Thread: Smart Appliances that Talk to the Electricity Grid -- Coming Soon

I saw a good article about appliances that can actually communicate with your power company and reduce usage during peak times. Power companies are beginning to raise prices during peak times to try to reduce usage. Most businesses don't have a choice as to when they use power. You have to keep the lights on while people are at work! But residential customers can change their habits. When they wash clothes, watch TV, turn on the hair dryer.

But what about the appliances that you don't think about? Like your refrigerator or your hot water heater. Those seem to just come on an off whenever they feel like it. But soon these appliances will be able to learn when the peak times are in your area and switch into a power saving mode during those times. Your water heater may be set to drop its temperature from 130 degrees to 115 degrees during peak times, making it unlikely that it will need to come on. Your refrigerator may wait to run the defrost cycle until an off-peak time when energy costs less. These are things that you'd never notice in your daily life but multiplied across millions of homes could actually reduce the number of power plants that are built and the amount of energy that is wasted during the non-peak hours.

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