Treating homes, offices and commercial buildings as intelligently networked collaborations can contribute to enhancing the efficient use of energy. When smart houses are able to communicate, interact and negotiate with both customers and energy devices in the local grid, the energy consumption can be better adapted to the available energy supply, especially when the proportion of variable renewable generation is high. Several efforts focus on integrating the smart houses and the emerging smart grids. We consider that a highly heterogeneous infrastructure will be in place and no one-size-fits-all solution will prevail. Therefore, we present here our efforts focusing not only on designing a framework that will enable the gluing of various approaches via a service-enabled architecture, but also discuss on the trials of these. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2011.