Most devices have a Standby feature so that when you need them, they can turn on quickly. In Standby mode, they don't draw a great deal of power but they do consume enough that when you combine all the devices in your home, it starts to add up. The TrickleStar PowerSaver is a simple but effective solution to eliminating the use of that extra electricity which can not only save you money each year but also help the environment as well. In the average home, around 12% of the yearly power bill is attributed to devices in standby according to TrickleStar.
The device is a fairly basic idea, executed brilliantly. It is an automatic switch connected to two power cables. The first cable is the Master cable and you connect your TV to it. The second is the Slave cable which you plug a power board into and connect all your other devices to. The switch is designed to detect when you turn your TV off and it goes into power save mode. When it notices the TV is in power save, it cuts power to all the devices connected to the Slave plug. Unless the TV is turned on, none of your other devices receive any power.
Obviously, this could be a problem for certain devices such as PVRs that need to be in standby to record programs when you aren't watching TV but for any devices that are just sitting there doing nothing, it's a great idea.
The device also has a number of dials that let you manually set up the power save wattage threshold of any device connected to the Master plug. It is automatically set to detect the threshold of a TV in power save but if you want to use it in a different configuration, you can manually set it to detect the wattage of other devices too. By allowing customisation, it opens the unit up to endless uses. As long as the device connected to the master socket has a power save feature you can set it to turn off any other devices you wish. If you wanted, you could connect the lamps in a room to the slave and have it so when you turned off your TV (or whatever device you have as master), the lights turn off as well.
