Will You Buy a Smart Refrigerator?

Will you look for products that use Smart Grid technology when you buy your next oven, refrigerator, washer or dryer?

Short answer, no.

Longer answer,

Discrete devices like fridges and washing machines, stoves and ovens etc, just need to be efficient at what they are supposed to do, period.

There is no need for networked connectivity, and even less need for authoritarian control.

Just another example of trying to fix an assumption of a symptom...

Indeed. Reliability is inversely propotional to number of parts.
The common brick is very reliable, however at KrisDel^TM laboratories we are working on a new networking brick which will communicate with it's neighbors mutually monitoring their reliability.
The bricks will report back a regular rleiability retrop to a betmax video recrodre.
Del

Truly funny

Anyone want to see pictures of my Whirlpool refrigerator that is rusting from the inside out because they didn't properly coat the steel or use a good grade of steel? This wasn't a cheap fridge either. Spent over $1,000 14 years ago.

The U.S. appliance industry is right where U.S. automakers were thirty years ago. Riding on reputation, selling garbage.

We just put new Whirlpool appliances in our kitchen. Every time there is a power outage, I have to reset the clocks in them. Since the technology to set clocks automatically has been around for, oh, 20 or 30 years, let's start with that "smart" before we get excited about "tendrils" and appliances that override our commands.

To directly answer the question: no, my appliances are already too "smart" for me.

Attempting to open the fridge for a midnight snack, the door locks and a tiny transducer emits a small electronic voice: "Go back to bed you putty butt!"

I definitely would buy such an appliance but does the electric grid need to be updated to provide best time and rates for appliances to be able to run at the most advantageous moment?