Twenty-six inventions

You build the schedule on your phone or laptop, the gateway keeps it, and it reaches the water heater or dryer over whatever network that appliance happens to speak. The setup & pairing screens in its figures are a family's first 10 minutes with the system. [Proposed: I designed the onboarding flow shown here.]

The gateway is a translator. Phone traffic comes in on 1 channel, is reformatted for the appliance network on another, and answers come back the same way, so devices that were never designed to meet can share a home. [Proposed: That is what let the product outlive 3 generations of hardware without being redesigned. Confirm the number before it ships.]

The whole system in 1 claim: a network for the people in the house, a network for the utility, a network for the appliances, and the gateway passing messages among the 3.

The box on the wall has indicator lights and no screen, because the family already owns the screens it needs. The filing says why in plain terms: every energy manager on the market in 2010 forced one more display into a home that already had computers, phones & televisions, and cost a great deal for it. Setup, schedules & status live on the phone or laptop instead, which keeps the gateway cheap and lets the interface improve without touching the hardware. [Proposed: Putting the interface where people already are is a position I have held since, and this is the first time it became a patent.]

The same gateway as 1 small box that plugs straight into a wall outlet, computer, storage & power supply inside a single housing. The orthographic and exploded views in its figures are the product itself. [Proposed: I worked alongside industrial design on the enclosure; say so or cut.]

The gateway can be switched between jobs: energy management, home automation & security, or a display mode with large type and stronger colors for someone with poor eyesight. The filing even imagines a bathroom scale reporting through it. [Proposed: The large-type mode is the earliest accessibility provision in any of my filings.]

The first filing, from 2008. A snap-in module lets a refrigerator or dryer listen to whichever utility serves the house, and when the utility signals a peak the appliance drops to a low or lowest energy mode on its own. The family buys 1 appliance and it works with any utility, and the gauge & calculator on the refrigerator door show what each setting costs per year. [Proposed: This came in my first year as the first interaction designer at GE Appliances, and the door screens in its figures were the first smart-grid interfaces I designed.]

With Eric K. Watson, John K. Besore, Michael Thomas Beyerle, Darin Franks, Byron Guernsey, Darko Ilickovic, Mallika Ravindra Patel, Brian Michael Schork.

One system watching everything in the house that uses, makes or stores energy: each appliance, the solar panels, the battery, the meter for the whole home. A single application serves both the family and the utility from the same data, and gives the household an energy profile, a carbon footprint, and suggestions for what to change next. [Proposed: This is the system view the rest of the GE Appliances filings sit inside.]

With Natarajan Venkatakrishnan, Kevin Farrelly Nolan, David Joseph Najewicz.

On a hot afternoon the solar panels make the most power at the same hour the utility pays the most for it. During that peak the house drops to a minimum-use profile the family has set, so as much of its own generation as possible is sold back at the premium rate.

With Joseph Mark Brian, Michael Thomas Beyerle, Jay Andrew Broniak.

The family sets a ceiling for the whole house and ranks their appliances. When demand would cross the ceiling the system turns things down in their order, not its own.

With Michael Thomas Beyerle, Jay Andrew Broniak, Joseph Mark Brian.

When the grid goes down and the generator starts, the system keeps the load under what the generator can supply. It switches off whatever the family has marked as non-essential rather than letting the whole house trip.

A standby generator usually tells you its fuel, battery & service state on a panel out by the garage. This puts those readings on the same home screen as everything else, so you know it will start before you need it to.

With Joseph Mark Brian, Michael Beyerle, Jay Broniak.

A water heater that measures its own hot and cold flow and reports it to the home network, so the family can see how much hot water they use, what it costs to heat, and how this week compares with last.

Most water heaters hold 50 gallons at temperature all day for 2 showers in the morning. This one takes a weekly schedule from its control panel, lets the water cool when nobody needs it, heats ahead of demand, and has vacation & high-demand keys for the exceptions.

The scheduler without the scheduling. The heater learns when the house actually draws hot water and programs itself around it, so the saving happens without anyone opening a settings screen.

A pool pump runs for hours a day and does not care which hours. This brings it into the home system with a schedule that avoids peak rates, and a screen that shows the utility's state and lets the owner override it.

A flow meter on the main line, read by the home controller, totals how much water the house is using and compares it with what it should be. If something is running that should not be, it tells the family and can close the shutoff valve from wherever they are. [Proposed: The filing opens with a line I still agree with: a leaky pipe always happens at the worst possible moment.]

With Jay Andrew Broniak, Michael Thomas Beyerle, Joseph Mark Brian.

Pick a start and an end time and see what each appliance, and each job an appliance does, contributed to the house's electricity, gas or water. Consumption by task rather than by meter, so a family can see what a load of laundry costs.

A separate invention from the one above, though the titles differ by 1 word. This one answers a question after the fact: between these 2 dates, how much did the dryer use? Pick the range, pick the appliance, read the number.

When the family computer sits idle it becomes the home's energy display, cycling through live electricity, water & gas use and what each is costing right now. Nobody has to log in or go looking; the information is on the screen they walk past. [Proposed: My first filing on ambient display, from 2009, and the thinking carried straight into the control room work at GE Digital 6 years later.]

With Jay Andrew Broniak, Natarajan Venkatakrishnan, Joseph Mark Brian, Byron K. Guernsey.

The home energy manager as a whole: every appliance reports its own consumption, a meter reports the house total, and a controller passes the utility's price & demand signals to the appliances, which decide locally how to respond.

Pairing an appliance to the home network without typing a security key. The radio is plugged into the phone or laptop first, which binds it, then into the appliance, so the connection is secure and the setup is physical: plug in here, then plug in there.

With Michael Francis Finch, Henry Nader Kobraei, Elliott Dean Koehler.

A price change from the utility usually arrives as a text at 4 in the morning. This one is a sound: when electricity is about to get expensive, the appliances that already have speakers chirp from several rooms, in time for someone to act. [Proposed: Sound as an interface runs from my student work for blind users, through the Kentucky School for the Blind and the Georgia Tech sonification lab, and this is where that line of work produced a patent.]