Making it easier to save energy

Everyone wants to save energy, but there are few individuals who can tell you exactly how much energy the devices in their homes consume. For example, which consumes more power - the dishwasher or the television? To answer such questions and to give consumers a sense of where the energy guzzlers hide, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin, Germany has developed an application that demonstrates the energy consumption of individual devices in the household. The basis for this is the 'Hydra' middleware developed by the institute which is extended by an energy protocol. A middleware reduces the workload of programmers: in Hydra's case, by administering the communication between devices...

Read the whole article on

More from