The Future of Thermostats

Sumi Das: Thermostats have been in our homes for years. They control the heating and air-conditioning systems we count on. Unfortunately, they're cumbersome to program. When left unchecked, we end up consuming more energy than we need. But in the future, new devices will help us monitor our energy use, waste less power and save us more money on our utility bill. Cutting down on greenhouse gases, is important to helping our planet survive. According to NASA, levels of carbon-di-oxide are higher today than any time in the past 650,000 years. So how will we be able to lower our power consumption in the coming years? Michael Kanellos: They'll start seeing thermostats. Then basically, we'll start glowing red. When it indicates that you're using too much power in your house, you can turn it down. Then you're also going to have thermostats, you can hook into your PC and program. It's going to be a lot easier than programming that LED thermostat you have now. Sumi Das: Michael Kanellos is the editor in chief of Green Tech Media. He says one day energy devices in the home will all be networked together. The meter in the garage will connect to your PC, which you could then use to program and control your thermostat. Michael Kanellos: You'll go to your computer, you'll set the hours, you'll set the temperatures and you're done. Sumi Das: In Redwood City California, Silver Spring Networks is creating new technologies that will help connect meters and thermostats to the utility company's power grid. Raj Vaswani is the CTO of Silver Spring Networks. Raj Vaswani: The communications technology is a wireless card that looks like this and goes inside of electric meters or other devices on the grid. What it does is it allows utilities to connect much more directly with their consumers and to manage the grid better. Sumi Das: Google, IBM and others are all developing new technologies to help us conserve energy. Microsoft has created Home, a new energy tracking tool that works a lot like the Money Management software you already have on your PC. Rob Bernard: The way that you can use it is you can go to any web browser and any machine. They literally just enter information about your home, and it'll give you a prescription of ways that you can save energy and help save the environment. It'll actually start to give you a profile that looks at how much energy is your water heater using, do you have the right insulation in your home, should you consider replacing your windows? Sumi Das: The software analyzes the information it gathers, and makes cost saving recommendations on your energy bill. Rob Bernard: It's one thing to tell you oh, lower your temperature by two degrees? Well, what does that mean? Well, what if I actually could tell you to lowering your thermostat by two degrees will save you in this case $196. Alright, now that's real action and that's real money. It'll also tell me how much carbon I'll save if I'm interested in understanding how am I helping the environment? Sumi Das: Of course, monitoring your energy consumption is only one piece of the puzzle. The most important part will be networking your appliances. Soon, your washer, dryer, oven and freezer will all be connected. Michael Kanellos: You're going to start seeing appliances get more and more intelligent, increasingly as time goes on. Fridges and ovens and everything else especially driers in your basement are going to be hooked up with networking. Basically, you can hook them into your network; you can hook them into your smart meter, and that smart meter then can control when those things function. Sumi Das: It could be a couple of years before you see new thermostats and meters in the home, but the work is underway and not long from now, these technologies will be common place. The future of thermostats, saving the planet and your wallet all at the same time. For ZDNet, I'm Sumi Das.