Let there be lightIN THE future,homes will use electricity much more sensibly than they accomplish now: turning the lights off automatically when no one is around; adjusting the heating regularly to suit a householders daily routine; making certain the electric car is charged up using off-peak rates; even drawing power from the car’s battery in the event of a grid outage. A variety of plug-in devices can already accomplish some of these things. Yet lurking in every home, usually in a dusky cupboard or down in the basement, and is a humble piece of equipment that,with a bit of tweaking, could replace them all with a single command centre.
The equipment concerned is often referred to as a fuse box, and although nowadays it is unlikely to use actual fuses—strands of wire that slit off the current by melting in the event of a power surge. Instead,such boxes contain a panel of electromechanical switches called circuit breakers. Typically, a breaker contains an electromagnet through...
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Source: economist.com