All Articles Tagged Major Appliances

Julie Jacobson | 02/16 07:57 AM, 0 Comments

Home energy management systems (HEMS) and smart appliances have “so far, failed to take off as many had expected,” ABI Research concludes in a recent report. “Many products are still involved in small pilots and have failed to hit retail outlets in any large number.” We couldn’t agree more, which is why we excluded smart appliances and energy monitoring systems in our 5 Home Technology Opportunities for 2012. But ABI suggests we’ll see some traction in in the smart-appliance market by 2017, with 24 million units shipping worldwide by then:… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 09/27 08:33 AM, 0 Comments

Smart appliances may hold a lot of promise for the home of the future, but you wouldn’t know it by CEDIA Expo 2011. Two companies showed white goods at the Expo: Samsung and Wolf/Sub-Zero (in the Control4 booth). One was really smart, one not-so-smart. Let’s start with the latter. Samsung’s RF4289 “smart refrigerator” had a very pretty touchscreen with built-in WiFi and speakers hidden in the ice dispensers, but that was about it. There were no energy-management features or integration to speak of. Instead, the $3500 unit is “more a… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 01/06 09:31 AM, 5 Comments

Every major appliance manufacturer has shown “smart” refrigerators, freezers, ovens, washers or dryers at some point in the past five years, but none has amounted to anything. Luxury brand Sub-Zero may have the first viable plan for the so-called “smart appliance” category, as we saw in a sneak preview at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) in Las Vegas. The company is exhibiting with Control4, its first home automation partner. In a demo at the Control4 booth, project engineer Steve Nackers pre-heated a stainless steel Sub-Zero oven to 350 degrees.… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 05/18 05:26 AM, 1 Comment

GE Appliances & Lighting claims to be the first company to achieve ZigBee Smart Energy certification for its smart or smart grid-enabled appliances. The Smart Energy profile, finalized in April of this year, ensures interoperability between compatible devices and the smart grid – normally via a ZigBee-enabled electrical meter. There are several such meters now on the market. There are also a variety of compliant thermostats, in-home displays and gateway products – all of which an communicate two-way with ZigBee Smart Energy meters and the utilities that employ them. (View… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 05/07 09:10 AM, 9 Comments

It all started when GUI designer Guifx was asked to create an interface for a refrigerator. The request came from an embedded hardware partner, Amulet Technologies, that wanted to demonstrate the app for Embedded World 2010 in Germany. Guifx head honcho Morgan Strauss says in his blog, “In addition to normal dispensing operations, the dynamic nature of touchscreens provided the opportunity to get creative and add features such as automatically displaying the volume of water as it’s being dispensed.” Guifx is a spin-off of Audio Advisors (now Ask the Advisors),… View this story