Just a little trickle can add to your power bill.
The Tricklestar Powerboard is a power-saving gadget with an interesting approach to saving power – it turns appliances off for you. Essentially the Tricklestar is a multiplug board, but with the important difference that it has a "master" plug linked to four "slave" plugs.
How does this save you power? Say you've got a home-theatre system with a TV, blu-ray player, game console, AV receiver, and a subwoofer. If you plug the TV into the master plug and the other appliances into the slave plugs, when you turn off the TV the other appliances are also switched off. So these appliances won't be slowly leeching power while on standby.
On the back of the Tricklestar there's a switch that sets the standby power threshold for activation of the slave outlets – depending on whether the appliance is on standby or operating. The thresholds will cover most appliances.
The Tricklestar has an "always on" plug, which is handy for those devices you'd rather not turn off. So you won’t keep turning off your modem/router by accident. It also comes with phone line and TV antennae surge protectors.
The savings (calculated at 24 cents per kWh) are fairly modest – they average about $17 over the course of a year. That’s the problem: with the unit costing between $80 and $120, depending on where you buy it, the payback period is quite long. However, not paying for power you don't need is good and helps the nation’s overall power consumption as well. And obviously the amount you save depends on what you plug into it.
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Do the same job. Our tv, video and dvd are plugged into a powerboard or multi-box as some call them. When this is turned off at the wall, every thing is off. When we arent using one of the above on a regular basis, it gets unplugged from power board. We dont record alot of stuff or watch alot of dvds so they are unplugged. No use having power going to something you arent using.
I use a number of mechanical countdown timers to turn off things like dehumidifiers, wall heaters,to save power.
There's a similar product by Jackson which has been around for a while.