The typical U.S. household has dozens of devices and appliances that heat rooms, wash clothes and dishes, provide light, offer entertainment, and more.

There’s one thing they have in common: they use energy, and not always efficiently.

A furnace might continue to burn fuel when the morning sun is heating the house. A television might stay on standby all night, when no one is around to watch it.

A Home that is Smart Enough to Turn Off the Lights

What if all those devices were linked with a wireless, Internet-based system that uses cheap, compact sensors? A furnace might check the weather forecast and know when or whether to start. Or a television might go off standby mode for the night.

With no impact on residents, a house could become more energy efficient.

That’s one possible payoff of a project conducted by Microsoft Research Scientist Feng Zhao and his team of researchers.

They’re working on a low-power, low-cost Web-service network that could run on two common AA batteries for several years and link together household appliances and devices such as smoke detectors or window-break sensors.

Tiny Devices Challenge Microsoft Research Team

While such a network sounds charming, as well as entirely feasible in our increasingly wired world, Zhao, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and manager of the Networked Embedded Computing Group, says creating a network like this poses formidable hurdles.

"The challenge is big," he says. "On each device we only have 48 kilobytes for storing code and 10 kilobytes as working space, and a tiny microprocessor that has to run off two AA batteries."

Compared to the enormous power of typical notebook and desktop computers today, he says, that’s minuscule.

How Do You Get a Furnace onto the Internet?

Another challenge to the development of a household Web-service network is that sensor arrays currently don’t use common Web communications protocols such as IP (Internet Protocol) or Web Services. This means that the sensors can’t easily communicate with each other or with computers on the Internet. Zhao’s team is developing sensors that bridge that communications gap.

"If you can make a sensor speak Internet languages and protocols as a desktop or laptop does, then you can take that little device and another computer can query it just like they do on the Web," says Zhao. "They become full-fledged citizens of the Internet."

These tiny sensors could be placed throughout a household to monitor energy usage or link appliances in the following possible ways:

A motion detector that is part of a home security system could detect that no one is home and turn off lights or furnaces.

A network of tiny sensors could use weather forecasts and other data to manage household energy usage.

The system could turn off lights or delay tasks such as dishwashing during hours when energy usage and costs are highest. "That could have a real impact on energy savings," says Zhao.

In a home where a prototype of the system was tested, one estimate showed energy was reduced by 24 percent.

Ahead: Staying Informed about Forests or Other Ecosystems

Microsoft Research’s development of tiny sensors has many other applications, says Zhao. His group has already deployed sensors in energy-intensive data centers to monitor hot spots and optimize cooling.

Researchers at universities have placed sensors throughout forests or other ecosystems to collect information on a scale that is not possible from aerial or ground observations.

"It’s very exciting," Zhao says of the little devices’ potential. "It’s like having an entirely new scientific instrument for making observations."