Markus Loffler had a power outage leaving his house in total darkness and resulted in a refrigerator full of food left ruined. Brainstorming on solutions he decided the end goal was to take his refrigerator off the grid but needed a reliable method.
Loffler’s solution is UNplug, a device using solar energy and electronics to reduce power usage and intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Markus says that in the United States 100 million refrigerators, modems and laptops add 33 billion pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to four coal burning power plants.
UNplug supplies uninterrupted power by controlling the power source that goes to an appliance, switching between the grid, solar power and batteries. One solar panel is enough to take a refrigerator, laptop and modem off of the grid.
Two configurations are available, the first using an ATMega328 controller, compatible with Arduino and without the need for wifi signal. The second option uses a Spark Core microcontroller and wirelessly sends data allowing for connection to the Internet of Things.
Fully building the appliance power system required UNplug, a 12 or 24 Volt power inverter, batteries, a charge controller and at least 250 Watts of solar modules. An online dashboard allows the user to monitor energy usage from anywhere. The algorithms, programs and app are all open source and available on Github. Coordinating the Spark microcontroller with If This Then That can build easier-to-execute commands.
UNplug is a great project designed to be a part of the solution to greenhouse gas emissions but not the final solution. It’s obvious from the campaign page that massive amounts of development, prototyping and programming have gone into the product. The technical data provided for the electrical specs and assembly / installation is also very well done. The funding period ends June 17, 2015.