The designers over at Fujitsu have come up with a neat gadget for the energy-conscious consumer: a smart power strip that allows you to monitor the energy usage of individual electrical devices.
First spotted over on TechOn and translated by Ubergizmo, the Fujitsu strip appears at first glance to be a standard splitter for powering multiple devices from a single wall socket.
Where this particular power strip differs from the norm, however, is in the intelligence it can provide to the user: each individual outlet is capable of monitoring the energy draw of devices connected to it via a contact-free sensor, providing real-time stats on precisely how much electricity that port is providing. Each port can is capable of providing – and measuring – up to 2KW of power.
All this information isn’t of much use if you can’t track it, of course, and Fujitsu has that problem well in hand: a USB port on the power strip can be connected to a wireless transmitter – included with the device – which in turn connects the power strip to your home or office network. Once connected and configured, the stats from one or more of the intelligent power strips can be viewed, graphed, and collated on a computer – providing a far more detailed insight into electricity usage than is possible using more general energy monitoring devices.
Although it’s likely to please statistic geeks, the device also serves a useful purpose: by tracking the energy usage of individual devices – or of groups of devices connected to a single outlet on the strip – Fujitsu’s power strip provides a means for home and office users to better understand where their energy consumption goes, and perhaps find ways of reducing it which wouldn’t have been immediately obvious. Reduced energy consumption means lower energy bills – but with no pricing information yet available from Fujitsu it’s hard to predict just how much energy you would need to save before the device has covered its own purchase cost.
In an office environment, however, the savings are likely to be impressive enough to warrant a purchase – and Fujitsu’s device will provide a convenient way of tracking exactly how much energy is being saved by low-power initiatives in the enterprise, as well as possibly highlighting which employees leave their workstations switched on all night long.
Sadly, Fujitsu has yet to confirm when – or even if – this product will officially launch in the US.
