I've switched

Many sockets in the USA are un-switched, so your devices are much harder to switch off. This five dollar device gives you a switch for your sockets. Simple and effective product from Harriet Carter, they have a range of other useful power management products too.

Now that I'm back blogging, here is the lovely logo that Alex Deschamps-Sonsino from designswarm and tinker.it made for the site in response to my own poor efforts. If you want to link to the site and declare your i've switched position, then please feel free to use the image.

Thanks very much Alex, she also made the favicon for the site too.

I've been writing a book and bring up a small boy, so my attention drifted away from this site, sorry dear reader. In the meantime excellent devices like current cost have come on to the market, allowing for long term monitoring of household power consumption.
Many newer products like Pure's DAB radios and some Sony TVs are often sub 1W in idle mode, these efforts are to be commended. However this is great if you are buying a new radio or tv, but these tend to be products we own for a long, long time. Many people own a tv or radio for a decade or longer. Idle power consumption was not a marketing issue back then, so these products still exist, hence the need for switched power strips.

Individually switched is the key feature. The power strip, now gracing our bedroom, has a switch per socket on the extension. This means I can turn off the plugged in devices one at a time.

This is a simple benefit, I can leave the power strip plugged into the wall sockets and have the power strip beside my bed, I can turn off phone or computer power supplies easily and quickly. Also the light ( and power supply) is now controlled from this switch. Each country does these differently, in fact the cumbersome UK plugs are a benefit here, there size means that there is space for a switch.

Just for the sake of clarity, this is a power strip, they have many local names, about as many as there are plug types in the world. The UK plugs shown below are the more complex end of the plug types. They are all three pin and earthed, the wall sockets must have a switch, but the power strips do not have to have them. These are the bad ones. French and US examples to follow.

One of the background thoughts behind creating this site was about aesthetics or beauty. When you have a set of power supplies plugged into a power strip then they look tidy and correct. Unplug the ones you don't need and they look a mess. Hence the idea about switching off some of them and leaving the rest in situ.
A secondary motive is that I have a one year old son and I'd rather he didn't play with the unplugged power supplies. So there is a safety issue as well.

Short piece in the Guardian today on the multitude of power supplies required to support a digital life

We're under attack. Our civilisation is being colonised by an alien species intent on destroying our planet and, in the meantime, our sanity.

Evidence of this invasion is almost certainly only a few feet away, at your nearest power socket. Odds-on it'll be occupied by a little black box, possibly feeding a trickle of current into some half-forgotten electronic gizmo, possibly doing nothing but gently heating the surrounding air.

Read the rest on the Guardian

I agree whole heartedly, we have too many of these black blocks heating the air, a friend commented to me when I launched this site about the benefits of USB based charging, at least I can charge my iPod from my MacBook Pro.

Some quick back of an envelope maths about power consumption of those black power supplies. They take AC current 230V in Europe and 110V in the USA and convert it to DC current. They mainly seem to have a standby mode, even if they are not actually connected to the phone or the device they are meant to be charging. They are usually warm to the touch.
So, if you unplug your phone from the charger and leave it plugged in, then it can be drawing 10W of power or more, based on this standby power study from 2002. Taking lower end of this as a baseline it is surprising how much power is wasted. I've estimated about 2000W per day could be being wasted, say ten power supplies, which are actually in use for 2-3 hours a day and left on the rest of the time.
There are many of these in the average home, they drive bedside lights, radios, phone and battery chargers, provide power for scanners, hard disks and small speakers to name a few I own. In the UK 1kWh is the standard billing unit for domestic metering of electricity, it costs about 10 pence per kWh, so over a year it is possible to save about 750kWh or about 75 pounds, say 150 dollars. This is more than enough to pay for the cost of replacing the power strips in the first year. I'm planning on looking at the environmental impact of replacement in a later posting.
How many power supplies are left on all the time in your flat or house ?

A quick trip to a local DIY shop produced this photo, showing the range of power strips available and how few of them have switches. See the image on flickr for notes. The photo was taken in the UK, hence the three square pin plugs.

This blog is the beginning of a micro-campaign to encourage the general public, that is you and I to use switched extension blocks (or power strips). We'll also be persuading our retailers to stop stocking the non-switched variety and encouraging manufacturers to stop making the bulk of their products with out the all important switch.
Why did I do this? Well I'm as lazy as you and I know I should unplug each of the 20 or 30 devices in my house, but I don't always do the right thing. So I looked to see what was for sale and I was surprised, hence the focused micro-campaign.