I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
My dishwasher has a "wifi-button", so I decided to figure out what it does, as it turns out, it's completely useless. The only features you get is "you're out of rinse aid" and "Turn on remotely".
The thing is that turn on remotely is useless, it requires that you've added soap, closed the dishwasher and that it's turned on. At that point you might as well just set a timer.
There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest and a detailed error report, like heating element is 100% function, or water is leaking. None of those features will ever be available, because that's not why they are adding "smart" features.
We got a new dishwasher a while back and it came with a mobile app - this was a bit of a faff to get working but was mildly useful in that it would send a notification once the cycle was done.
Then after a few weeks the company decided they had to change their authentication scheme to something really complex and I couldn't be bothered - deleted the app and don't really miss it.
I measured the energy consumption of my connected iQ-500 Siemens dishwasher. It used 750 Wh per load total, regardless if I used eco (3h55min) or 40/50 degree standard program (2h15min). I am guessing the "eco" mode only saves water.
There's no money to save on spot price optimization there.
I intentionally bought the dumbest dishwasher I could find. It has two cycles: "Normal" and "Heavy Duty", a "Heat Dry"/"Air Dry" selector, and a start/stop button. I could not find one that was simpler.
"Less to go wrong" is my mantra for appliances. I want to switch them on and forget about them.
Dishwashers aren't very solar-friendly if you don't have net-metering.
They typically have a very powerful 2.5 kilowatt heater they run in bursts - for like 5 mins when prewashing, for like 10 mins when starting the main wash, and like 10 mins again when drying.
In between those times, the machine uses only ~60 watts for pumps.
I have often pondered what a world of machines designed to meet solar output looked like - and for a dishwasher it would involve the heater being modulated to match the solar output (and knowing that sometimes the wash cycle would take longer if a cloud was overhead so heating was delayed by a half hour).
Just have more dishwashers, and use them as storage cabinets: pick from a clean cabinet if you need tableware, deposit in a dirty cabinet when you are done and if you have at least three of them the transition is free to take a lot of time.
I can't imagine a scenario where you've got a large enough solar system that you'd want to be running a dishwasher off it, and you don't already have some battery storage elsewhere in that system.
The money efficiency isn't great - if you had control of the design of the dishwasher, simply having a hot block of concrete inside that you heated when there was spare energy would work out far cheaper.
Concrete costs far fewer $$$'s than batteries do, per kwh of heat stored, it also doesn't require inverters, balancing or safety systems, ad lasts millions of cycles rather than thousands.
I tried to do things like this in my home. It turns out for washers, dryers and dishwashers you should just set a timer to start at noon.
Once you've started an appliance on a cycle it's going to keep running, even if the sun goes behind a cloud. So you don't need to start it when the instantaneous solar power is at its highest, you need to start it when the predicted next two hours of solar power are at their highest.
And it turns out you don't need complex monitoring to figure that out.
That's exactly what I'm using this for. I have a home assistant automation that starts the washing machine when the daily solar peak power (as estimated by a web service for my location) is reached. Of course, I have to prepare everything in the morning. On sunny or even just bright days, no grid power is used.
No, not out of the box. They don't really support any automation, you can build something using Home Assistant or If This Then That, but now we're already past what I care to manage. There isn't even HomeKit integration (which I noticed is a trend, Google Home will be supported, but not HomeKit).
Even a door-open alarm works better as an actual alarm than an app notification. My fridge does that: it beeps if the door is left open, so you can get your ass back in the kitchen and shut it. I don't want to receive a notification from my fridge app while I'm at work because my wife left the fridge door open at home (or vice versa), I want whoever is physically close enough to the fridge to leave the door open to be notified.
I have yet to see a single non-bullshit feature from any "smart" appliance, honestly.
>I want whoever is physically close enough to the fridge to leave the door open to be notified.
Same - although I have experienced an interesting extension of this: HomePods now have alarm detection (the intention being to detect a smoke/burglar alarm). It is also triggered when the fridge is left open, leading to everybody in the household getting a critical alert (which ignores silent mode).
A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought. That is the only justification I've seen for a smart appliance I've seen.
I would like a smart fridge that lets me know what is inside - so I know if I should get milk or a salad on my way home. So far nobody makes that.
>A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought. That is the only justification I've seen for a smart appliance I've seen.
I feel this is a terrible trade-off: a minor convenience, in exchange for a huge attack surface that could allow someone to burn your house down remotely. The folks who build IoT systems have neither the skill nor the economic incentive to keep these things secure for the 15+ year lifespan of a durable good like a cooking range.
That's why govs should enforce standards for protocols/interfaces with a standard plug socket for a "controller". Replace the govs first though, fucking useless parasites.
Would be fun though, appliances can just have a "make me smart socket" with direct connection to hardware. Then it's the smart plug that needs kept updated, but more sustainable since it's used for many products. And if your manufacturer for it dies, can just replace with any other one since they'd be held to a standard.
> A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought.
I'm sure this is practically not a real issue, but my OCD paranoia cannot fathom the idea of my oven being on while I'm not at home due to safety / fire concerns.
I recently bought a LY washing machine that is smart.
I now get notified when the wash cycle is done, this is actually useful for me as the laundry is not in the house so I can't head a buzzer or chirm. Is it essential? Probably not.
Yup, this is the proper use for connecting an appliance. Our washer and dryer are in the house but from my computer I can't hear the dryer, the washer doesn't even make a noise. (Note that we've had these for more than two decades, they're dumb by modern standards.) I've been wondering why somebody doesn't make a smart plug that can send a notification when it's connected appliance draws power in a specified fashion. (Both would be fine by setting a minimum power to activate, then below it for a specified period. Washer: The threshold would be set below the power the agitator draws. The delay would cover the rinse fill time. Dryer: Threshold for the motor that runs the drum, immediate trigger if it stops.)
We got an air fryer recently, a Cosori brand. Its app tells me when the cook cycle is done. I named the device "PHILLIP J AIRFRY", so getting a notification makes me smile. Yeah it's silly, but sometimes you need a little frivolity in your life.
Genuinely curious.. how well does this really work, with a real fridge? All the photos I've ever seen are of a staged fridge someone clearly spent an hour or two carefully arranging, and usually between 20% and 50% capacity.
Our fridge is often 75-95% full, and things I can picture this maybe being useful for - sour cream, pickles, condiments - are often pushed to the back or on the door. I have a hard time imagining anything besides mostly "oh look, the milk jug/large bowl of last night's leftovers is blocking the camera's view of this entire shelf".
It also doesn't solve the "is that sour cream at least 1/3 full?" or equally important "is it expired?" problem, which is almost worse, because seeing the sour cream container leads to a false positive, which means I don't buy more despite needing it.
This is me too (or more realistically, my fridge is 95-105% full) but there's definitely people out there whose fridges are usually mostly empty and a camera could reasonably capture everything in it.
Our fridge is most of the time fairly full so I have a hard time imagining where would I put a camera to get a good overview of its contents. It seems that the best place is about half a meter outside. Even a fisheye would not be able to cover both door and the rest of it.
They have fewer points of technical failure; they don’t create security attack surface; they save bandwidth; they get you talking to your friends, family or neighbours more; most food waste biodegrades, so it’s not really “waste”.
What litte food is wasted because people buy stuff they alrwady have by forgetting what's in the fridge pales in comparison the necessary effort and resources spent in building and installing cameras un a fridge and run the infrastructure necessary to connect those cameras to a phone over the internet.
for sure I haven't run the numbers, but I think you may be underestimating the impact of food spillage / waste. Not only is spillage huge in the US [1], but one has to take into account where the loss is.
A pepper that you buy, cook and then throw away represents a considerable investment:
* you spent energy cooking it
* your supermarket had to stock / refrigerate 1.x pepper to sell you 1.0, because of spillage
* the pepper had to be transported from the land, to and fro various logistic centers (sometimes 100's of miles)
* the farmer had to grow 2.x or even 3.x peppers to sell 1.0, because of esthetics (unfortunately) .. meaning often esticides, heating, etc
I am generally not in favour of IoT, and am not convinced that a camera will correct this issue. But make no mistake: food spillage has a huge impact.
I like this response a lot, despite it opposing my earlier comment. Good thoughts, thanks.
For me, this highlights issues that I think the IoT solutions paint over. The IoT solutions all require the same kinds of industry you're describing here, but for tech. So when those get deployed you have the food industry and the tech industry, but you still have the problem of the mouldy pepper, and the problem of food deserts, and a few other things.
I still think my "you can throw out the excess/mouldy food" and the "solve the problem by communal cooking" are better approaches than the IoT one. But I accept this is intuition and guesswork, and somewhat politically motivated. I'm sure about the politics here, but I accept I'm light on the data. I think the real problems are elsewhere than either the individual mouldy peppers and the IoT; somewhere around deeper, harder issues to do with supporting towns and cities the way we do.
I understand why that sounds like it should be true, but I'm not convinced that it actually works out; I can get an esp32-cam for <$10 with no effort off the shelf, so if the cost to build the thing in is even vaguely close to that then the real cost is going to be dominated by the internet connectivity and phone client side of the equation. I guess it depends how much food we're talking about throwing out and how much it costs, but that strikes me as plausibly within an order of magnitude.
> If your argument requires saying it's fine to just throw out food, maybe you should reconsider.
You're making some kind of assumption and value judgement here but not articulating it. You're using the assumption as leverage to make an emotional push for me to think differently.
What's the assumption and value judgement? Can you weigh that against the biodegradability comment and share more of your thoughts?
We were discussing the apps for the fridges, which naturally work well beyond physical proximity. One of the locations they work fine at is grocery stores.
Opening the door wastes energy. And it seems, mindlessly going to the fridge to see what's inside even though you know exactly whats inside, is a thing many people are doing. So there is an argument to be made, that a camera in the fridge is a useful feature. I'm happy without it.
If the budget for the cameras, screens and apps would be spend on extra isolation, the fridge would overall be more ecological. But hey. I understand. Gadgets sell more than quality.
If you want a fridge that’s really efficient, you can’t beat a chest/bunker freezer with a thermostat. Refrigerators lose all their efficiency from the vertically mounted doors which allow all the cold air to fall out instantly when you open the door. A chest freezer door is mounted horizontally so the cold air stays trapped inside, even when you open the door. This makes all the difference in the world!
I don't have the ability to experimentally verify, but I would think so? A window is going to be there 24/7 and air doesn't actually have that high of a specific heat, so you'd really have to be constantly opening the door for it to come out in favor in my understanding.
My fridge also have an app, with usefull feature - to track when bottle of water is cooled. But. I need to login to app everytime I open this app.
And there is no way to share access to the fridge to anyone else.
I need a printer to print. Ideally at acceptable prices (I know, ink cartrigaes are like razor blades and that won't change ever). Plus points if it can be connected to a network (which is a given today). I don't have to print when not at home (why would I fax something to myself when I am not at home?).
Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors and decent color management.
Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder).
Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by the way, price wise for home office use.
Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling. And inks, of course.
Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call innovation.
Epson make EcoTank inkjet printers ink tanks that you refill from a bottle, not cartridges. It's vastly better than ink cartridges, there's no comparison on price, convenience or environmental impact. The tanks and bottles hold vastly more ink than a cartridge does. The printers are roughly the same price as any inkjet printer. I do not work for Epson.
I have an ET-8550 at home. Considerably more expensive than a comparable non-tank printer, with a factor of two give or take. Without a deal I got, it would have been out of budget.
Compared to a Canon Pro-200, they break even was somehwere around 300 printed a4 photo mark if I remember my detailed calculation correctly (850 bucks for the Epson and 460 bucks for Canon).
But yes, I love that printer! Because as a person, I do not think like my busoness case, hence with the tank printer I do kot think about print costs, as the purchase price is gone and mentally accounted for.
I never compared the non photo-capable EcoTank and whatever canon calls their tank printers to the cartridge cousins so.
Glad you like your ET-8550! That's quite a high end, expensive printer. I have a much less expensive one, though, on reflection, I agree the initial purchase price is higher than cartridge ink jets.
There are only so many A3+ sized photoprinters on the market. Decent ones that is that don't suck at B/W printing. It, for me at least, came down to either the ET-8550 or the Canon Pro-200. Break-even was somewhere around 300 a4 photos, based on retail price for the printer. So initially, I was inclined to take the Canon one.
Then I got a decent deal on a ET-8550, and the peace of mind to not re-run ink costs everytike you print, plus the Epsons home office printer functions, closed that decision. And the Epson print quality is really good, even B/W, so far, with the right media setting and paper, no colour tints whatsoever (at least that I can see).
know what innovation i want? a smart camera inside that can scan a label and remember the expiration date...then later on notice if i've used it or not and remind me to cook it/eat it if nearing expiration
That would be useful, however expiration dates are often printed so badly and in all kinds of locations that it seems difficult to make that work reliably. Also people wouldn’t want photos of their fridge contents being uploaded to a cloud AI all the time.
Because RFID labels are orders of magnitide more expensive than bar codes and printed labels. The groccery margins are simply to small for that. Hence the sarcastic comment of using expensive tech (that had its own hype curve in the early 2000s), to solve the how-do-I-know-whats-in-my-fridge-without-opening-it problem.
IF RFID was useful for other purposes it would be worth the small cost (scale can bring RFID costs down - it would cost more than bar codes, but potentially can bring enough logistical benefits that overall it is cheaper). However so far the logistical benefits can't be realized because you can't be 100% sure you read all the tags in a room.
Sounds like a good idea until I think about our fridge. After the weekly shop the fridge is packed to the brim so much that the light barely makes it into some corners. How would a camera help here?
Towards the end of the week the fridge is empty and I know I need to buy the usual.
Use case dead in my head.
It would be nice if there was a standardized machine-readable format for information like expiration dates. It would be neat to be able to track inventory in the fridge by just scanning a label when you put it in then scan and mark as empty when its done.
My fridge has a door open alarm, and I wish it didn’t. I have yet to be like “wow, I’m so glad my fridge is beeping at me while I try to decide if I want chicken or taco leftovers”.
I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)