BenHollis.net

A few weeks ago I watched the Al Gore slideshow-in-a-theater “An Inconvenient Truth“. Al Gore parts aside, I thought it was very good, and while it didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know, it did make me think about my power usage. In general, I hate waste – wasted money, wasted time, wasted material, wasted code. Wasting energy is just as bad. This is sort of at odds with my tech-heavy lifestyle, though. I realized that my entertainment center probably wastes a lot of energy while I’m sleeping, what with the TV, the stereo, the powered subwoofer, the Xbox 360, the PS2, the Xbox, and who knows what else casually sipping electricity just to stay in “standby” mode. I don’t know what standby mode does, but I don’t think it’s worth having power flowing into those devices for the 18-odd hours I’m not using them each day. So I went to Target and bought a remote switch – the one I got cost less than $25 and included two remote switches that are controllable by one remote. All I needed to do was put this between the wall outlet and my power strip, and now I can just push a button on a remote when I go to bed to save energy. The other switch now controls the lamp over in the corner. It’s perfect. And I bet within a year I’ll have saved enough on my electricity bill to pay off the switch. In that time I’ll be using just that much less electricity, saving that much carbon dioxide, and sparing my equipment that much wear and tear. Seems like a win overall.