UPDATED 14:41 EDT / JANUARY 10 2012

The Smartest Home on the Block

How would you feel if every piece of appliance in your home were “smart”?  Like a refrigerator that tells you which foods to eat and avoid, or if a food is nearly expired and updates your grocery list, or a stove top that automatically adjusts the amount of heat needed when you’re cooking, or a washer and dryer that tells you how long you should wash your clothes or what detergent to use. Wouldn’t that be awesome?  A world made so easy because appliances were made to “think” so you won’t have to.

But picture this: what if you’re one of those people who aren’t really friends with technology?  You know, those people who, even if their lives depended on it, can’t operate even a simple tech gadget like a smartphone?  Living in a world full of “smart” appliances would be like hell for them.

Well, they can always opt to not buy any “smart” stuff – for now.  For the rest of us geeks, a smart home is a gadget heaven.

Since connected devices and stuff with “smart” preceding their names are abundant in this year’s CES, let’s take a look at what the future holds for our homes.

LG

At last year’s CES, LG introduced the Smart Appliance with THiNQ Technology.  These are appliances connected to a network that enables them to alert owners that something is wrong or allows customer service to service a machine remotely.

This year, they introduced the Albert Einstein of smart appliances, which are now designed to hook up to your home network, talk to your mobile devices, and be accessible on your TV.

The LG Smart Refrigerator is a “total food management system” that comes with French doors and an LCD panel that gives you access to online shopping, a grocery list, calendars, and photos so you can scan your groceries into the system to track them as they get old and moldy.

Aside from the smart icebox, LG also has a smart washing machine that self-diagnoses problems, a smart vacuum cleaner with remote monitoring, and a Smart Oven that allows monitoring of cooking through mobile devices.

Thermador

Thermador, a fully-owned subsidiary of Bosch and Siemens Home Appliance Group, the third largest appliance manufacturer in the world, introduced the 2012 Freedom Collection which sets the new standard for refrigeration.  It features ultra-bright LED theatre sidewall lighting with automatic dimming; the industry’s first full-width, flexible ice drawer with 11.45-pound capacity; all stainless steel exterior ice and water dispensers; convenient full-extension drawers and oversized freezer baskets; full-extension wine racks with exotic hardwood; and 3-D panel adjustability for the ultra-flush installation.

“The 2012 Freedom Collection represents a substantial commitment by Thermador from a product development and manufacturing standpoint with the goal of becoming the luxury appliance category leader in refrigeration, and we are excited to announce that we have delivered on that goal,” said Zach Elkin, director of brand marketing for Thermador.

“Culinary enthusiasts will appreciate the cooking convenience and versatility of placing Thermador fresh food, freezer and wine columns anywhere in their kitchen, and trust that the new Freedom Collection represents a new standard in quality, design, performance and reliability.”

Aside from that, they also announced and demonstrated the Thermador Freedom Induction Cooktop, the first full-surface induction appliance with the flexibility of a natural-mapping user interface that intelligently recognizes cookware size, shape and position to deliver heat without boundaries, at this year’s CES.

“Induction is perhaps the most revolutionary cooking technology. Thermador takes induction cooking to the next level by answering two questions with the new Freedom Induction Cooktop: what if you could place cookware anywhere on the cooktop? And, what if you can use cookware of any size and shape on the cooktop?” said Elkin.

“Thermador’s industrial designers and engineers imagined what was possible and they’ve delivered the world’s first induction appliance to eliminate conventional burners and instead offer one limitless cooking surface with an intuitive touchscreen interface.”

Whirlpool

Whirlpool announced at CES that they would be bringing connected appliances to the marketplace — a step closer to making many of its appliances “smart” by the end of 2015. In the following 18 months, four appliances will be introduced including a refrigerator, dishwasher, washer and dryer.

“Our electric grid is more than 100 years old and not designed to handle all of the appliances in today’s home. Today appliances work independently from one another with little opportunity to optimize,” said Warwick Stirling, global director of energy and sustainability for Whirlpool Corporation. “And while manufacturers continue to explore innovations that improve the energy efficiency of individual products, the incremental gains are getting smaller and becoming more expensive to achieve.”


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