People joke about a future where everything in your house has an IP address, but usually end up questioning the value of being able to route packets to and from your toaster. I'm not ready to write in defense of the networked toaster, but I can think of a couple of key appliances to have on the network. First and foremost, your home furnace.
Home furnace monitoring is already done, of course, by for a nice monthly fee, by companies like Brink's. In the past, I never even considered springing for this service, but that was before I moved way north to Minneapolis. In general, appliances like furnaces and refrigerators are highly reliable, so the chances of them working fine the day you leave on a trip and flat-out failing while you are gone are fairly low (but even that can happen, and the consequences are direLLL). Making matters much worse, however, is the fact that modern, pilotless furnaces have an Achilles' HeelLLL: the ignitor. And the failure mode of the ignitor is binary: works perfectly one day, fails completely the next.
Sure enough, we weren't here 2 months before our ignitor failed. Fortunately, even though it was December, it wasn't that cold, and we were at home. So we got if replaced without undue discomfort, for a tidy $175. But that really drove home the point to me--this could easily have happened while we were away for the weekend.
Any component as critical, failure-prone and relatively inexpensive as a furnace ignitor should have redundancy built in. Of course, that also would play well with the IP-enabled furnace. The average homeowner would never notice that there #1 ignitor had failed, so they would lose some of the benefit of redundancy by not promptly replacing
8:49:45 AM 
|
|
