I did not have much luck finding a convection oven with multiple zones controlled from your iPad; in fact I had quite a bit of trouble locating the simple iGrill mentioned in my previous post on remote controlled household technologies. (If you happen to be at the show still, it’s in the Dr. Bott booth in the North Hall.)
Turns out there are just not a lot of technologies for controlling your home appliances remotely, not now and not in the immediate future. The closest I found to what I was looking for was a concept group from LG called the ThinQ; the ThinQ oven will tell you when its recipe is done and can be turned off or switched to warm from your handheld device. The ThinQ refrigerator knows what’s inside, so you can check in from the store if you forget whether you need milk or eggs. I also saw a Samsung refrigerator with a touchpad that accesses the internet and will check the weather or look up recipes; these are the key applications mentioned by a panel of working moms. But communication is one-way; you can’t input your own recipe for example. And all these devices are just ideas; they’ll never come to market in their current form.
If all you want to do is control electrical usage, we’re quite a bit further down the road as many manufacturers get ready for SmartGrid solutions that will adjust your power flow or delay electrical functions based on time-of-day metering. These devices talk to the utility’s smart meter via wireless or a powerline connection. Seems like it would be an easy enough thing to have the appliance accessible to the consumer, as well, via that same interface. And I hope some manufacturer or consortium of manufacturers will try that out soon. In the meantime, the IGrill looks pretty hip after all.
That’s it for CES; back to non-tech subjects in my next post.