Appliance manufacturer Whirlpool has received $19.3 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding as part of its Smart Grid Investment Grant program, the company announced Thursday.
Whirlpool, which markets appliances under the brand names Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, Brastemp, Consul, and Bauknecht, joins General Electric in what seems to be a quest for designing the most well-behaved appliances.
The Whirlpool Duet washer and dryer is part of the company's 2009 line of eco-efficient laundry appliances. With Department of Energy funds, it plans to have a million smart-grid-compliant dryers ready for sale by 2011.
(Credit: Whirlpool)Similar to GE's smart-appliance ambitions, Whirlpool plans to develop home appliances that can connect and communicate with municipal smart grids. The machines will be able to receive signals from a smart grid, letting it know of off-peak hours, a good time to turn on and run.
Whirlpool, which will get its funding over a two-year period, plans to match the funds in order to have a million smart-grid-compatible dryers available for public purchase by 2011. The smart dryers will be manufactured in the United States, and the company estimates that the dryers could save consumers $20 to $40 per year in energy savings.
In addition to the smart dryers, Whirlpool has pledged that by 2015, it will discontinue making appliances sans the ability to communicate with smart grids. It will no longer make "dumb" appliances at all.
That promise, however, is dependent on a few things happening.
"This commitment is dependent on two important public-private partnerships: the development by the end of 2010 of an open, global standard for transmitting signals to, and receiving signals from, a home appliance; and appropriate policies that reward consumers, manufacturers, and utilities for using and adding these new peak-demand reduction capabilities," Whirlpool said in a statement.
Whirlpool's announcement follows President Obama's release this week of plans to overhaul the country's electrical grid to turn it into a smart-grid system. An estimated $8.1 billion is planned to be spent on 100 smart-grid projects in 49 states. Utilities themselves will kick in $4.7 billion, while the remaining $3.4 billion will come from the U.S. government as stimulus money.
If you dream of turning the front of your refrigerator into something other than a place to stash alphabet magnets and smudged Christmas photos, so does Whirlpool.
Whirlpool again is sharing a vision of a fridge-as-high-tech launchpad, which is not a new idea, as veteran industry reporter Julie Jacobson notes here. (Whirlpool, among others, has been touting ambitious visions of a connected kitchen for busy housewives and househusbands since 2000.)
The iGo recharger
(Credit: Whirlpool)Whirlpool's Centralpark refrigerator, announced last fall, uses a power outlet on the top of the freezer door.
Vendors are starting to offer devices that work with the outlet and hang from the fridge.
Jacobson claims Whirlpool's so-called Centralpark initiative might not be ambitious enough, even calling the fridge a "little hokey."
Nonetheless, Whirlpool's Centralpark model nabbed an Innovations 2008 Design Engineering award from the Consumer Electronics Association and was named one of the year's hottest new products by Home Magazine.
iGo, owned by Mobility Electronics, is the latest to sign on with Whirlpool's Centralpark plug-and-play initiative.
IGo makes a recharging station that works with Notebooks, iPods, MP3 players, Bluetooth headsets, portable game devices, cell phones, and various other gadgets. While Notebooks are probably not the best device to recharge on the front of your fridge, (maybe on top of it????) iGo's gadget-charging device promises to work with more than 2,700 smaller gadgets.
The Centralpark connected refrigerator costs about $2,000. The first (and only) product available for it is Ceiva's Wi-Fi digital photo frame (about $249). The frame has an 8-inch LCD screen and a built-in card reader for displaying thousands of photos on the refrigerator door.
Future offerings will include Ambient's 7-day Forecaster, which brings current and seven-day weather for 150 U.S. locations to users; Brandmotion's iPod speaker station, which holds any size iPod; the Clio Vu Web tablet; and Quartet's Qnote message center, which offers a dry-erase writing surface and ambient surface illumination.
(Credit:
Whirpool)
Contrary to popular belief, we really are responsible types here at Crave (sometimes), so we don't want to leave the impression that we advocate refrigerators that feature only alcoholic beverage dispensers, whether they serve wine, beer or hard liquor. (We'd rather combine that function with the TV or pool table, for the sake of practicality.)
For the teetotaling Craver we suggest Whirlpool's new "Espresso" fridge, which has a built-in coffee maker and water filter so you can be your own barista without ever leaving the kitchen. Appliancist says the java fridge was "designed by Whirlpool engineers mainly for the British market, where people consume close to 70 million cups of coffee every day." So much for tea.
From the 'Centralpark Connection'
(Credit: Whirlpool)Having conquered the living rooms of grandparents everywhere, Ceiva's digital photo frames have set their sights on a new target--the refrigerator door. As ridiculous as that might sound, it's really the next logical step in kitchen-media convergence: We've already seen a steady rise in fridge TVs from Samsung, LG and other manufacturers, after all.
Ceiva's partnership is with Whirlpool, a deal that makes sense because of the appliance maker's "Centralpark Connection" networked line of iceboxes; Ceiva provides slide shows received by online feeds, so it's a natural fit. The Whirpool frames will debut next month in Best Buy outlets, according to Gearlog, for $250.
Besides, they can't be any sillier than those microwave TVs from Holland.
(Credit:
Plastic Bamboo)
Crave has featured all manner of luxury items for humans, but we've been woefully (and unintentionally) remiss when it comes to the same for lesser beings. In a first step toward rectification, therefore, today we offer something for our pelted friends--a paw spa.
This mini-whirlpool is like a Jacuzzi for four-legged loved ones, though it's big enough only to soak one aching paw at a time. Available at Amazon Japan, it even comes with a matching towel and "a special super-absorbent mat," according to Plastic Bamboo. Little did we know that Japan's agenda for a human-free society would cater so much to pets but, upon reflection, it makes sense in a perverse way.
(Credit:
Born Rich)
It's Saturday, and here in New York City it's finally started to feel like spring. This 70-degree sunny weather sure makes me want to cruise around the streets in style; you know, in a really pimped ride. But not just any pimped ride. It's got to be a Mini Cooper. And it's got to have room for my whole posse in the back. Oh, and one more thing--there simply must be an open-air whirlpool so that we can splash around and cool off on these hot city afternoons.
Good thing a car builder in Los Angeles created the perfect ride for me!
(Credit:
Born Rich)
I want to stress one thing: This car is not a joke. It really is a 6-meter-long stretch limousine made from a Mini Cooper S car. It seats six. There's a flat-screen TV, DVD player, telephone, and black leather interior. And there's a pool, too--more specifically, a whirlpool that can hold two people. It has a retractable sunroof, so that you can have pool fun in the sun or cover it up in case anything goes on in there that, um, shouldn't be displayed in public. So yeah, how much do you think this bad boy costs? I'd be almost willing to forsake my coveted Bathtub Racers for it.
(Via Born Rich)
(Credit:
Popgadget)
The way manufacturers are splattering color all over home appliances, you'd think they'd seen Pleasantville one too many times. We've seen transformations in everything from stoves and refrigerators to washing machines and even personal safes.
So we're curious why it's taken so long for them to get around to that staple of every house, apartment, condo and dorm room: the microwave. But Whirlpool is trying to make up for lost time with its "Max" ovens, which Popgadget says are available in black, silver, baby blue and raspberry red. They also sport a non-traditional casing of rounded corners and control panels on top.
We hope only that Samsung exercises some restraint when it joins the trend.
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