Household Electricity Bill Cut by Cell-Phone-Controlled 'Middleware'
R. Colin Johnson | Date: 01-19-10 | Comments: 2
- Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany) proposes "middleware" to monitor and control energy consumption with your mobile phone.
Green uses of cell-phone technology
will be unveiled next month at the GSMA Mobile World Congress (Barcelona, Feb.15-18) which
kicks off with a keynote from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and winds up with a
concert by rock band Duran Duran. In between, hundreds of exhibitors will sport
cell-phone innovations, including the FIT, which will be showing its green
middleware solution for smarter energy consumption.
FIT predicts that consumers will
voluntarily cut down on excess energy consumption when they are given the
opportunity to monitor and control it. Unfortunately, today most household
appliances can only be controlled by consumers when they are standing in front
of them. For instance, drying your clothes at 3 a.m. might cut your monthly energy
costs, but few people will take the trouble to get up at that hour to turn the
dryer on. That's where Fraunhofer's middleware comes in, offering a convenient
user interface that allows consumers to monitor and control the energy
consumption of every device in their household, including scheduling those 3
a.m. clothes drying sessions.
FIT has designed what it calls a
"plogg," which is an adapter that installs between the power outlet
and the device being controlled. The plogg monitors the flow of electricity to
all household devices, and reports their consumption over a wireless connection
to the user's PC where FIT's "Hydra" middleware is running. Hydra can
then send commands to each plogg for turning on or off devices, as well as to
dim lights.
Hydra presents to users a real-time
readout of all the energy being consumed by the devices in a household, and
highlights the biggest energy consumers for the moment, day, week, month and
year. What's more, using a cell phone, users can view the same Hydra readouts
and adjust the same parameters remotely as they do when they are at home.
A cell phone can also be used to
allow users standing in front of an appliance to monitor its current power
consumption. The consumer uses his cell phone's camera to take a photo of the
appliance, which is matched by Hydra against a catalog of photos it maintains
of each device using a plogg. Hydra then sends the current energy consumption
of that device to the cell phone's display.
Hydra also allows
"what-if" scenarios where users can try out different power
consumption combinations. For instance, consumers can ask how much energy will
be saved per year by switching all the bulbs in their house to use the same
low-energy fluorescent bulb in a given plogg. Hydra can also compare the energy
efficiency of different devices, for instance telling users how much more energy
will be consumed by playing a DVD on a Sony PlayStation 3, compared to playing
it on a dedicated DVD player.
