Inteligent Power Outlets

Greetings to All,
I have just viewed this on TED - link intelligent power outlets.

Very clever stuff - I was wondering how we could innovately use this tech with C-Bus. With the thought to help the boffins with a design path.

One of my thoughts is that you could identify an individual appliance no matter which outlet it was plugged into?

 

This was timely

I was just musing over this concept the other day. I had left the iron on and I though how good it would be to be able to feed back the iron status to the HA system in the house.

Ethernet over power and coax is starting to make a comeback
(see http://www.corinex.com/ as an example)

What if we extended the coms system into the device. It does not need to be Ethernet, but data over power technology is moving forward.

Add smarts to the appliance and it can announce that it is on, left on, remotely be turned on/off or other functions all with a single cord. If no coms system is available it operates as normal.

This follows on from another thread started recently here where the concept of C-bus over powerline was asked? No reason why it could not be done using a similar idea.

Mick

 

Smarts in appliances would be great if you could get the manufacturers on board!
I think being able to turn off all of your unused GPO's in your "Exit" or "Sleep" scenes would be fantastic.

It would also keep the greenies happy who want us all to turn appliances off at the wall.... Who does that anyway?

 

The same people who think that turning off their mobile phone chargers and devices on standby are going to save them huge amounts on their power bills and save the planet... funny how they are usually also the same people who leave their air-cons set to temps that are stupid.

 

They can monitor the amount of current, drawn so they could report to a central display for a breakdown of energy consumption.

This would have great value to meet the green building Rating www.gbca.org.au/ or www.nzgbc.org.nz/ where commercial building owners have to show they are using power efficiently. Would be easy to identify where the power was being used / wasted.
I would have thought that there was golden opportunity to embed this tech into C-Bus to meet the need of managing a commercial building carbon footprint.

AMX can connect their touch screens to the Edmi smart meter so users can monitor the energy consumption. This control earns the building owner star points.
The new NZI building in Auckland NZ has a 5 star rating. They went to amazing lengths to achieve this rating. Suppliers had to show that the packaging their products came in was sustainable. All building waste from construction had to be recycled.

A comment from another forum mentioned a problem with existing appliances if the wall plate only switches on when a smart plug is required to turn it on.
With that thought, it occurred to me that this would require that there be specific power plugs on after market sales for replacements. If all the intelligence is in the wall plate then it might be a simple RFID tag (Limit me to 60W) that one could fasten to an existing plug. They must have worked out that this would be an issue early on one would have thought.

 

Regarding the monitoring of energy consumption, you could use an electronic ID tags to identify the appliance, but in most cases you could allocate outlets to particular appliances anyway.

Fridge, Coffee machine, MW oven, Rangehood, TV, Computer, HiFi etc are all appliances that tend to stay plugged into the same outlet most of their life.

It's only things like vacuum cleaners, irons & maybe powertools which get plugged into various outlets - so you wouldn't need ID's for every appliance.

 

while a lot of devices may be static in their location, there is often not enough power outlets and a power board is required, thus complicating it a little more.

But the concept is sound - label a GPO as the device connected.

Mick

 

What about an RF controlled power board?

How about using a few of these....better still integrating the RF into cbus somehow....

http://www.belkin.com/au/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=486412

come to think of it is there a wireless cbus gpo??

 

LMAO!!!!! Oh my, that's a damn good laugh, Belkin are promoting their remote-controlled power-board to switch off devices that sit there in standby, thus saving a few milli-amps of power, and yet the damn power-board itself will be consuming stand-by power to allow the remote control!!! How seriously, pathetically, hypocritical!!!

 

Its all about visible LED's!
Bet the powerboard doesn't have a standby LED!

 

oh god... the horror... a whole 30mA @ 1.5v... 0.045watts.... oh no...

Wont someone PLEASE think of the planet?!?!
What about our children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children?

I'm all for being energy efficient, but the stupidity of the general public and our government astounds me...
Even my mobile phone charger draws less power when there is nothing plugged into it, and yes, I've checked that one day when I was bored.

 

Oh God they're all out.... is it a full moon?

 

Hope thats not a serious questions

 

You can have C-Bus control over any device connected to a standard socket outlet by using a wireless plug adaptor. If you don't already have a C-Bus Wireless gateway you'll need one of those too:
http://www2.clipsal.com/cis/technical/product_groups/cbus_wireless/plug_adaptors

 

Generally yes.
But there are some devices that even in stand-by use an enormous amount of power.
eg
My Samsung 50" Plasma uses 19w in standby
Samsung LCD 32" uses 20w in standby
Hitachi CRT TV uses 9W standby
These 3 items use at least $50 per year min in electricity if there are left in standby for 24 hrs per day.

The LCD is meant to uses less than 1.5w in Power saving mode as per the manual

 

Appliance signitures

I would speculate that each appliance in a house would have a relatively unique fingerprint - in terms of current draw characteristics, load cycles, resistance, capacitance.
If this can be exploited the appliances do not need id tags to indentify themselves to a controller, the power outlets just need to be able to measure at least current draw.