Smart, Internet-connected kitchen appliances make it easy to prepare Internet spam?
We’ve already mentioned that the Internet Of Things was big at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and have already covered Internet-connected vacuum cleaners with airborne dust sensors.
Now, you might not have heard about the smart range hood. (It was, of course, right next to an Internet-connected smart refrigerator, the product labels and exhibit material still in Chinese (see photo gallery), so fresh off the boat is this smart refrigerator technology. Actually, there are several companies with an Internet-connected refrigerator. They are sometimes the butt of jokes. It is technology of the future. It was already the technology of the future at last year’s CES. And probably the year before. A little slow getting off the ground. In more recent news one of these Internet-connected smart refrigerators was recently implicated in spam sending attacks after being hacked. So if there’s spam in your Samsung smart refrigerator, it’s not clear if you mean email spam or Hormel Spam(TM).
But wait, smart range hoods are a green technology
But smart ventilation hoods are actually a green technology. One site estimates they can save commercial establishments like restaurants and hotel kitties as much as 25% on their vent hood energy operations, perhaps $15,000 annually for a 300-room hotel according to one commercial estimate.
Smart range hoods have different types of sensors. Some simply use time of time, others monitor heat from the range or are integrated with the appliance and monitor energy inputs or the appliance controls.
Older non-Internet connected models, like this smart hood we spied off Amazon, simply use heat. The model announced at CES actually uses a smoke and dust sensor, so it’s very similar to these new airborne dust sensors that this blog (and our free app) are dedicated to and that we believe will soon become a mainstream household item in the next decade or sooner.
Some ‘ventilation hoods’ are actually air purifiers in disguise
In addition to very much wanting our app to be able to control kitchen ventilation hoods (e.g., after you run a dishwasher, a major source of indoor air pollution currently ignored in most households), it’s worth noting here that some ventilation hoods are configured to recirculate air (rather than exhaust) and may feature a charcoal filter (and thus the so-called ‘vent hood’ is actually a not-very-good air purifier. See our earlier article reviewing air purifiers that actually work.) Vent hoods are also integrated into many over-the-range microwave ovens (where they may exhaust to the outside or may simply be a weak air purifier). Weak air purifier or not, Chinese-only product labels or not, we’re happy some company is finally thinking that it is time to incorporate these dust sensors into more products to simultaneously improve air quality and save energy.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted all of this back in the 1960s. (Well, except for the Internet of Things part.)
In the house of the future, your ventilation hoods and air purifiers will be integrated into a smart home automation system that will be aware of airborne dust levels, status of windows & doors via the security system, and use of polluting appliances like dishwashers and gas ranges. That smart house, which automatically filters out air pollutants, was predicted by Arthur C. Clarke in a newspaper article after a visit to the world’s fair back in the 1960s (minus the Internet-connectivity thingy). It is not yet here, but with the advent of these new inexpensive sensors, dust monitoring Internet apps like ours, and the Internet of Things, it soon will be.