A Fuzzy Logic Based Retrofit System for Enabling Smart Energy Efficient Electric Cookers

In recent years, our homes have been equipped with smarter and more energy efficient electric appliances such as smart fridges, washing machines, TVs, etc. However, it seems that cookers seem to have been left aside during this trend although for example in UK electric cookers consume up to 20% of the evening peak electricity consumption. In addition, over half of the accidental house fires are due to cooking and cooking appliances. One of the reasons for the lack of smart energy efficient electric cookers is the complexity of performing energy efficient control for the various cooking techniques. This paper presents a fuzzy logic based system which can be cheaply retrofitted in existing electric cookers to convert them to semi-autonomous, energy efficient and safe smart electric cookers. The proposed system can control the cooker heating plate to allow the semi-autonomous safe operation of the most common cooking techniques including boiling, stir/shallow-frying, deep-frying and warming. In addition, the developed system can identify when human intervention is necessary and when dangerous situations happen or are imminent. We will present several real-world experiments which were performed in the University of Essex intelligent apartment (iSpace) with various users where the proposed system operated a cooker semi-autonomously in various cooking modes and it was shown that when compared to the human manual operation, the proposed system realised an average energy saving of 21.42 %, 34.43% and 20.29% for the boiling, stir/shallow-frying and deep-frying cooking techniques respectively. In addition, the realised smart cooker has shown unique safety features not present in existing commercial cookers.