We’ve all heard about how much power gets wasted (and eventually paid for) when chargers are plugged into fully charged devices, or just attached to an outlet, while their device rides around in your pocket. But while we may randomly disconnect a charger here or there when we realize it’s not doing anything but costing us money, few of us have an organized plan to really cutback on “vampire” power consumption.
What we need is a little help, and the UFO Power Center has landed to help us Earthlings out. The power center is basically a four outlet power strip, but it goes well beyond what you’d expect in such a device. Activity on each outlet is individually monitored and the device can be joined to your Wi-Fi network to make consumption information available to you through either an iPad or iPhone app. When you see what your consumption is, you can start to see when you don’t need power supplied to certain devices (such as, does your TV need power if no one will be home for eight hours?). You can set individual outlets to turn on and off at specific times and the outlets themselves can sense things like when a device is fully charged and shut off power that’s not needed.
The retail price is $129.95, but you can get it for a bit less at Amazon. If that price seems high, consider that this power strip could well pay for itself in a year of usage, something we wouldn’t expect of a cheaper, less intelligent unit.
Hi,
If use UFO power center,how can i use it for different device. for iPhone it may be more effective because the battery life of iPhone is too sort.
Thank you.
The power center has four different outlets on it, so you can plug in that many things, and they don’t necessarily need to be things that are recharging – it could be anything. Computer monitors or TVs could be a good choice as those have a continual power drain even when not being used. You could use this device to cut off their power when you know they won’t be needed, and save some money.
I’ll be doing a full hands-on review in the next week or two, so I should be able to give even more details of use then.