Echelon Technology Chosen To Help Reduce Energy Usage in Appliances

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Echelon Corporation, a global networking company providing technology and solutions for controls, smart metering, and energy and environment management, and LonMark® International, a non-profit trade association, announced that CECED, the European Committee of Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances, has adopted Echelon’s technology as part of its Household Appliances Control and Monitoring – Application Interworking Specification (AIS) standard. The CECED AIS standard defines Echelon’s control networking technology platform as one of the technologies for communication among household white goods such as ovens, washers and dryers. The creation of a CECED approved standard is an important step towards a mass market for smart appliances and home automation and control in Europe.

According to Luigi Meli, Director General of CECED, “The CECED AIS standard provides a standard language and baseline to allow manufacturers to focus on innovation and the consumer experience rather than technology. The combined solution with Echelon’s standard will support the growing demand for intelligent home appliances that are more energy efficient, user friendly and convenient.”

“Our organization is taking a leadership role in bringing these necessary standards to the market,” said Ron Bernstein, Executive Director of LonMark International. “Together, the existing LonMark interoperability certification program and the CECED AIS standard take a significant step forward in making it easier and more cost effective for manufacturers’ products and systems to work as one cohesive system – an absolute requirement for widespread consumer adoption. We believe that the CECED AIS standard is the key that unlocks the market for home owners to purchase products that are smarter, more energy efficient, and more easily integrated into intelligent homes.” LonMark certified products meet rigid interoperability guidelines that insure that products from different manufacturers work together to deliver increased flexibility, greater efficiency, and more value to end-users.

“The development of the CECED AIS standard is a significant win for both appliance manufacturers and consumers. The ability to have everyday household appliances automatically communicate with each other – regardless of manufacturer and without homeowner intervention – is a market enabler that allows manufacturers to address issues of energy consumption and conservation on a very large scale,” said Anders Axelsson, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Echelon. “This important industry standard will, we believe, dramatically grow the market for more energy efficient smart homes.”

A key requirement for the home automation market is a common means of creating appliances that automatically install into a home network. This is essential in order to eliminate the need for technical knowledge on the part of the consumer. Echelon has created the Interoperable Self-Installation (ISI) technology, an integral part of the LonWorks platform, to satisfy this requirement by providing a simple, automatic discovery and installation process to enable home devices and appliances to communicate with each other without complicated user interaction and setup. As soon as power is applied or a "service" function is activated, the devices discover one another and configure themselves into fully functional control systems. System changes, such as the addition of a new device or a modification to a lighting scene, can take place at any time without any special user expertise or training.