Is ZigBee really going to be the "Wi-Fi of home power management"?
The Times takes a look at home power meters, smart systems (typically with LCD displays) that monitor your home's power use and allow you to set up profiles for turning your electronics, lights, and HVAC systems off when they're not in use. This sort of monitoring has been been the domain of home automation systems for quite a while; there's little to indicate these new control boxes will really be all that different than previous home automation systems except for their focus on power savings over gee-whiz automation.
One company, Control4, intends to sell a smart meter controller for $500 in October. (Its interface is pictured above.)
But how do you tie all your home's equipment into these controllers? The Times is talking up the same three wireless home automation systems that have been in the cards for years: ZigBee, Z-Wave, and LonWorks. Despite proclaiming that ZigBee is "on the verge of becoming the Wi-Fi of home power management," I've still seen very few products utilizing any of the wireless home automation protocols actually hit the market. You can buy raw Zigbee components or switches and plugs that use ZigBee from vendors like Control4, but where are the products with integrated ZigBee chipsets?
Finding and Fixing a Home’s Power Hogs [NYTimes.com]
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Reading up on smart meters (c.f. Elster REX), automatic meter reading (AMR), and smart grids (c.f. slashdot), whether the communications protocol for these wireless mesh network devices will be ZigBee or 802.11 "Wi-Fi" or something else is still an open question. It seems that many modernized regions with trial deployments have barely gotten AMR off the ground, and that's a mostly self-serving trivial feature for the electric companies, while it also lays the infrastructure for future implementations.
However, there is some political pressure vis-a-vis the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which in this context is basically a fancy way of saying that power companies are going to be allowed to introduce capacity tariffs (i.e. dynamic pricing based on demand, which is kind of an open loophole for gouging because -- without the aforementioned home power management readers -- who's going to keep aware of a price that can change every 15 minutes?) in order to encourage end-users to adopt distributed generation such as combined heat and power (CHP) with microturbines or wind power turbines such as the SkyStream 3.7. So in response to the gouging people will feel more compelled to invest in localized electricity generation.
From the article:
"very few products utilizing any..."
Riddle me this: why would anyone use the word 'utilize'? Isn't it just a three syllable word that means 'use'?
I believe that, in this context, they mean "Wi-Fi of home power management" in the sense that ZigBee is an IEEE standard(802.15.4) unlike some similar but proprietary systems such as Z-Wave or largely wired systems such as X10.
The deployment of any home automation system is pretty minuscule, with wired X10 leading by a considerable margin; but ZigBee is closest to Wi-Fi in the sense that both are IEEE standards.
Why would anyone preface a question with "Riddle me this:" when they could just ask a question, even if it is just rhetorical and they're not actually interested in an answer?
Do you have something against syllables? Just because you prefer the synonym "use" to "utilize", do you really think that everyone else should follow your proscription? I find "utilize" here perfectly acceptable, and possibly even preferable to "use," and I don't think the choice requires any justification. But since you asked, go look up "use" and "utilize" in the dictionary of your choice; you will probably find that "use" has more possible meanings than "utilize," and so it seems reasonable to opt for the more specific word.
And it's a quotation from the blog post, not "from the article", which I blindly searched to get more context. If you actually want to make a point about language usage, at least get your sources straight and quote enough context for the reader to evaluate the choice.
I'm sorry that this is entirely off-topic, but armchair language pedantry on blogs has really been getting to me.
On-topic: I know nothing about home automation, but since the article itself talks about people looking into their power consumption more closely, consider (1) reading the power requirements on the device or in its manual or (2) looking at actual consumption using something like the Kill-a-Watt.
In reading up on ZigBee in particular, I come across lots of articles touting it as the next big thing, percolating through industry, but not so much at the consumer level yet. I'd be curious to hear more.
X-10.
I remember studying ZigBee for my undergraduate degree and thinking it was a fantastic technology. Unfortunately, for all it's worth, to create a ZigBee device, one has to be a member of the "ZigBee Alliance" which costs far too much money for many (especially small) companies to justify to create a niche device which does not interpolate with other current tech. This explains the absence of any decent ZigBee devices.
With WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, cordless phones and microwaves all emmitting around 2.4Ghz it's getting pretty crowded. Maybe at some point UWB devices will be availible, which would be nice.
Real "x-10" devices from X-10 Inc. are the crappiest crap ever crapped out of a crapper.
So hopefully the ZigBee standard has some quality vendors on board.