Fixing everything, really slowly

As has been discussed in comments on my “light bulb action” posting devices such as TV’s, DVD players and set top boxes that are in standby mode rather than switched off waste power. This wasted power costs you money and generation of that power most likely released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The simple solution to this problem is to turn devices off at the wall socket (if your countries power socket standard includes a switch). The problem is this is a pain, and being lazy I rarely bother to do this. So I was pleased to learn about the following products which save me the effort of turning devices off myself:

And this one:

These devices have one special socket and then two or five normal ones. The special socket can detect whether the connected device is switched on or off turns and the other sockets are controlled automatically. I’ve set this up in our living room to test it. I was annoyed that the Cable TV box was always left on when the TV was turned off. I plugged our TV into the special socket and the cable box into one of the others.

I found it to be really good. It doesn’t matter if I turn the TV off using the remote (putting the TV into standby mode) or using the actual power on/off switch on the TV the one click device detects that the TV is switched off and turns off the cable box.

One word of caution is that our cable box takes about 2 minutes to boot up from power off (because it is the cheap one the cable company gave us). This can be really annoying if you turn on the TV wanting to watch something specific. So clearly you need to think about how you will use this device before you get one, but I think its a very simple and useful product.
I bought mine from QuietPC because I was buying other things at the time, but you can also get them from Maplins and no doubt other places.

To find out more about how it works the website is here: http://www.oneclickpower.co.uk/. For international readers this UK only product probably isn’t much use to you. I’ve found a similar product for the US market, I’m sure there are others (please leave a comment with a link if you know of one).