Works Great for Coffee Maker or Other Appliances
I thought this switch can be programmed to come on and go off at regular intervals at a time of our choosing. Well, it doesn’t do that. However, what it does is allow you to set a time when you want it to go off. There are 3 time increments for this purpose. This works great when we want to leave the light on in our kids’ room to automatically go off after an hour once they have fallen asleep. This switch performs this function perfectly without a glitch. It’s a nicely made switch and is aesthetically pleasing.
Immediately shuts off the power once the time is up. The unit itself doesn’t draw any electricity when it’s off (according to the manual). Ideal for charging your cell phone overnight or when the wife uses her curling iron or hair straightener in the bathroom. The frustration-free packaging was a nice touch.
My roommates would get upset at me about leaving the toaster plugged in among other things. They work just as promised, one is used with the toaster. The other 3 are used with our phones and personal electronics.
My biggest complained is that they are too big. They they cover whatever sockets are near by (above or below them) so you can’t plug in anything right next to them.
We bought one for the breakfast area, where we tend to be on our laptops surfing or working on our work laptops. We liked how it worked, but kept unplugging to also use in the living room. So, we decided to just buy two, which may be worth it at the end since I heard laptops have pretty high vampire consumption loss.
I just wish we knew just how long it would actually take us to pay off the 9.99 cost (per unit) with the money we’re actually save on electricity. Guess we can plug in the laptop chargers through a Kill-A-Watt analyzer thingy that analyzes vampire power consumption, but we haven’t quite gotten there yet.
I just hope it was all worth the money we spent on these things. If anyone knows how long it may take to recoup the amount spent for these items, please let me know. Thanks!
Regardless, it’s nice to just push a timer button and know it’ll shut off in 30mins, 3hrs, or 6hrs. I wasn’t able to find any other similar product in the market, especially not with the trusted name as it!
I bought this so I could get an idea of the actual power usage of these appliances over a few days (the stickers only give maximum rated current draw). Comparing this to a Kill-a-Watt meter, the decision-maker was the remote display.
This unit works exactly as described – the documentation is a little thin, but it’s accurate. It would get a solid 5 stars if it had a function to display average and cumulative power use, and not just “cost-per-month” and “cost-per-year.” I cannot understand why the power-use figures are not available for display, since they clearly have to be tracked and recorded in order to compute the “cost.” It’s easy enough to do the math and derive the numbers I’m looking for, but it’s silly that that step is necessary.
I guess it was trying to make this into a device to “wake up” lazy consumers, but it’s still geeky enough that it should be able to display the raw data, and the CO2 function is just somebody at stroking their ego. My electricity is generated with a shifting mix of natural gas, wind, and nuclear. At no two times during the week does a single watt of electricity create the same amount of CO2. That particular display on the outlet is going to be such a poorly educated guess that I doubt I’ll ever even look at it, and the real estate on the device and in the software could have been better spent.
It’s functional and good enough that the above gripes are certainly not a deal breaker. You won’t regret buying this, even if you’re looking for raw numbers. It just seems like they should acknowledge that control-and-information-freak nerds are using this.