Patent ID: 7469288

Claim:
A system for monitoring the operating status of a group of laundry appliances in a laundry room comprising: multiple laundry appliances, each having a status signal generating mechanism within, said signal indicating the status of the appliance; a gang monitor connected to each of the laundry appliances, said gang monitor constructed to receive and process the appliance status signals and generate a busy/idle status signal representative thereof; a server for communicating with said gang monitor to receive the busy/idle status signal therefrom, said server constructed to process, compile and store a status record for each appliance; a user interface to provide access by a user to the server; a first communication link connecting the server and said gang monitor to allow the gang monitor to send status signals to said server; and a second communication link connecting the user interface to the server to allow access by said user to the server, wherein the server: calculates a preference factor (PF) for each appliance wherein said preference factor is defined as the likelihood that, if no appliances are in use, then the particular appliance will be the next one used; calculates cumulative idle probability (CIP) for each appliance wherein said CIP is defined as 1 for an appliance that is first started and CIP times (I-PF) for any remaining idle appliances; sets a minimum idle probability (MIP): compares the CIP of each appliance to the MIP; and generates an alert with respect to the appliance when CIP<MIP.