Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"By itself, the Belkin Conserve is just a nice 10 outlet surge protected power strip. What makes it really cool is the wireless remote control that you can use to completely kill the power to eight of the outlets. If you’re thinking “So what Julie, I already turn off all my electronics when they aren’t being used. What’s the big deal?” Well, the thing is that even when you turn off some appliances and electronics, they still use power. This is especially true for those AC adapter power bricks. Even if you just use them to charge a device, when you unplug that device, the AC adapter is still using some power. The Belkin Conserve will completely power off the outlets so that anything plugged into them will not use any power at all."

Previously, I've reviewed Smart Power Strips and Bye Bye Standby in the past. Both have their unique uses (and I still use them both daily). Belkin has taken the concept of the Bye Bye Standby and built it into a rather large power strip. I think the nicest feature is the wall mountable switch. But, at $59.99 you may want to pull out a Kill-A-Watt [Affiliate] and do some calculations if you are after this purely from a cost savings perspective as it might take you a while to earn back the premium.

"Bringing people together to save energy and money Sign Up and start saving. It's free! Sign up with Hohm and we'll provide you with a home energy report and energy-saving recommendations tailored to your home. How can you get a personalized energy report for your home?"

Hohm (home and ohm, get it) became available for sign-up on Monday. I've gone through most of the questions (and there are quite a few) and it looks like they will be able to give some pretty detailed recommendations, especially for the energy efficiency novices. But, it looks like some of the best benefits will be for those who's utility meters are accessible by the service. My city recently installed smart meters, unfortunately, other than a digital readout, there is currently no benefit for the consumer, although the promise there will be later.

"There's been a major push this past year in being more energy conscious when it comes to computing, and one way Philips plans to do that is by making sure your LCD monitor doesn't consume more power than it needs to. Called the Brilliance LCD, the upcoming display will feature a built-in sensor capable of detecting whether or not you're sitting in front of your monitor."

I'm all for features that allow you to automate your energy conservation. Hopefully this implementation is cheap enough so that they'll implement it across their entire line without a material increase in prices. If there is a significant premium, it will be difficult to earn back the cost in energy savings and those that are willing to pay a premium are probably already knowledgeable enough to just set their computer to shut off their monitor after a few minutes of inactivity.

Over the last couple of years, we have really been working to reduce our electric consumption with the hopes of eventually having solar panels installed. We’ve succeeded in reducing our electric usage by about 1/3. There were a few big things we did, like not using a dryer anymore and using compact florescent bulbs throughout the house. However, there are lots of little things that also add up and the so-called phantom power draw becomes really evident if you use a Kill-A-Watt [Affiliate] to start measuring the load. Last year I reviewed the SmartHomeUSA's Smart Strip Power Strips which was a great way to automatically cut power to many of your power-sucking peripherals when your computer is off. You could of course achieve similar results by simply manually flipping the switch on your surge protector, but sometimes your surge protector is not placed such that this is easy to do, like on many home theater systems. So today, we are going to look at an alternative solution, called Bye Bye Standby which, in a nutshell, adds a remote control to your power strip. Read more...