Another Stake Through the Heart of Vampire Power
by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN on 11.18.06
Here’s a clever little so and so. We all know about the deleterious effects of “wall warts” and their insatiable vampire-like appetite for sucking phantom power from our walls and power grids, and dollars from our pockets. It’s good to see more smart strips (and potentially even talking adaptors) come on to the market. The little Mini Power Minder has the smarts to shut off your computer’s peripherals and doodads when the computer itself is shut down. A USB cable connection lets the devise know when the computer is powered down and correspondingly shuts off power to the second outlet. Plugging a power strip into the second outlet would mean your printer, external hard drive, iPod, speaker system, and on-desk margarita blender can all go sleepy time when the PC is put to bed. Pricing in a $14.95, this might be irresistible. Assumedly, the upper outlet (for the computer) does stay active, which still means some power drain, making it not as smart at the Smart Strip, but comes in at about half the price. :: Mini Power Minder via Hugg (Linton)
Realy tops!
This looks great - but can we plug our drives into this? Mac users in particular, would this mess with the mounting/unmounting of drives that the Mac file system needs?
What would be nice is a remote control for the power strip. Seriously. It always ends up stuck behind/under something where it's hard to reach. 3-4 watts of remote-on to turn on even a few bricks would still save a lot of power.
For every "wall wart" you can shut down for 8 hours a day, you'll save roughly $3 a year. Shut down three of them plugged into a power strip for 8 hours a day, and it pays for itself in two years.
A cheaper alternative (and one I use) is to plug the power strip into a cheap $5 24-hour timer, and have it shut itself off during hours when you know you won't ever use your computer (11 PM - 8 AM for me).
It sounds like a clever idea. I would like to see them on the market here in New Zealand. In the meantime I will continue putting all of my appliances on timers - that way I know they are not sucking power while I am sleeping!
These units may be able to pay for themselves in savings on an electric bill, but what about their environmental impact? What is the cost of their production in terms of energy, byproducts, and waste in comparison to the savings gained? And even if the gains outweigh the cost, wouldn't the gains be even greater if we just learned to reach down and turn off the power strip ourselves?
It's important to not stick inkjet printers on a device like this as the printheads are sealed upon power-down. Just pulling the power via the plug leaves them open and subject to clogging, creating another waste problem trying to solve something else.
I can't believe that i'm the first one to say this, but:
Why not just turn the power off at the wall? I've got my stuff plugged into a powerstrip which is placed in one socket. When i'm not using the computer, I turn it off. I don't think it could get more simple than that.
Just a heavy duty relay that is switched on and off depending on if the USB port has power or not. Very smart idea, but for what it is, I think that it should be under $8.