The CSIRO has developed a way to network household and commercial fridges together in a distributed peer-to-peer fashion that lets them ‘negotiate’ with each other the best time to consume electricity. The organisation’s Intelligent Energy Research team based at Newcastle has developed a controller that can be retrofitted to any existing refrigerator.

Not quite as cool as last weeks Twittering Washing Machine, “The controller connects the fridges together using a distributed peer-to-peer system, according to Sam West, an engineer at the CSIRO. ‘It’s peer-to-peer so there’s no central point of failure and it’s very scalable,’ said West.”

The technology allows the refrigerators to coordinate their on/off cycles in order to use the least amount of energy possible between all connected devices.

In the future, all your home appliances could be linked together such as air-conditioners and dryers in order to save even more energy and money. Solar panels could also be networked to alert the other appliances that there is less power being created (the sky became more overcast), thus scaling down the power usage of connected appliances. As long as it keeps my Dogfish IPA cold, I like it! [via iTnews]

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