Surge Protectors
There are many products coming to the market at the moment with benefits of power, fuel and/or water savings. However, to have added benefits like 1. reduces electrical fire risk and 2. protects appliances against power surges does give a sincere element of value for money.
Electrical wholesalers, high street shops and computer stores sell a wide range of surge protectors in multi plug format i.e. plug-boards. For many people they are the ideal solution for protecting important and often expensive equipment from the damage that can come from a power surge or electrical spike.
Flat panel TVs, monitors, audio equipment, DVD player/recorders, home or office computer systems, Xbox, Play-station, etc. Often they are left plugged in with all plugged in equipment on standby.
Stand-by Power or Vampire power
Stand-by power can eat a healthy chunk of electricity. If an office runs 9-5 Mon-Fri that leaves 128 hours per week of stand-by for equipment left plugged in. In a household case, if the entertainment TVs, etc. are on from 5pm to 11pm Mon-Fri and 2pm-11pm Saturday and Sunday you have a stand-by of 120 hours per week.
Couple this information that the average household bill is estimated to include up to 10% of electricity wasted on standby and you may find yourself with a decent savings possibility.
Power Saving Devices
Timers
Some run on timers but they normally use some electricity to run while plugged in and will shut down at their allocated time whether you want them to or not. These are generally more suited to lighting applications and mobile electric heating solutions.
Intelligent Energy Monitoring
Such devices are capable of shutting down non essential peripheral devices when a computer is not in use. For example when a PC goes into sleep mode a signal is sent by USB cable to the plug board and specific sockets on the board are shut down. Normally these would be printers, scanners, monitors, external speaker systems etc.
Intelligent Energy Saving
We were so impressed with one device that we put it for sale in our shop, the SavaSocket. The SavaSocket six socket plug-board has two sockets for applications you wish to have always on. e.g. wireless broadband router or sky recorder box and four sockets that can be shut off at the push of a button or by easily pairing it with an IR (infra-red) remote control.
In stand-by mode, the unit will use as little as 0.19 watts of electricity. It is a surge protector to help keep your hardware safe from spikes and surges and is at home in both office and domestic situations alike.