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Lord Kelvin, the famous physicist, said it this way: “You can't manage what you can't measure.” To understand electricity consumption, you start by measuring how much electricity you actually use. With the UFO Power Center, you can measure and view both real-time instantaneous power (Watts) and energy (kWhr) usage for the past day, week and month.

Being able to compare consumption in a "before and after" conservation scenario lets you see the impact of the changes you've made to reduce your energy consumption. The UFO Power Center stores one month of energy usage information for each outlet for one month in five-minute intervals.

Energy Cost

Your dollar savings can be significant even for a small reduction of energy use. At a cost of $0.18 per kWhr, eliminating 100 Watts of consumption in a year corresponds to $150 in savings. The UFO Power Center helps uncover the appliances and devices in your house that use the most energy. The results may surprise you. For example, some popular DVRs and set-top boxes use up to 1 kWhr per day, which translates into a cost of $5 per month.

With a UFO Power Center, saving a substantial amount of energy is relatively simple, particularly with a home theater or in a home office. In addition to manual remote switching, the UFO also offers automation capable of stopping electrical consumption when an appliance is not in use. The UFO Power Center can be set to turn off the socket when a device has finished charging or to eliminate the power that many appliances draw when in standby mode.

Socket Schedules

Automatic schedules can be set to determine the hours of the day a socket is powered-on. When used with set-top boxes or other consumer electronics products, this is an effective way to kill standby, or "vampire," power usage.

Some appliances waste electricity when they are continuously connected to a power outlet. A wine cooling refrigerator or a water fountain, for instance, can very effectively be managed with short on and off schedules.

Use your iPad or iPhone as a remote control to easily turn appliances on and off without touching the appliance, including those with a power switch that is difficult to reach.

Individual timers are also available to start appliances in off-peak hours and to take advantage of lower electrical pricing during those hours.

Socket Roles

Standby power consumption – electricity used while an appliance or device sits idle -- is a significant and generally hidden cause of waste in most households. Some appliances only need to be on when another appliance is also turned on, such as a printer connected to a PC or an audio amplifier or DVD player used with a TV.

In these situations, the UFO Power Center allows users to assign "roles" to sockets and to define one as the "Master" and one or more as "Slave." When the device powered by the "Master" socket goes into standby mode, the UFO senses the reduced amount of current flowing and turns the "Slave" sockets off. Conversely, when the device powered by the "Master" socket is turned on, the UFO turns on the "Slave" sockets.

In the case of a home theatre, the UFO Power Center socket used by the TV would be defined as the "Master," and the AV Mixer, DVD Player or Console sockets as "Slave." The standby consumption of these types of consumer electronic appliances is responsible for up to 30% of the electricity used in a home and it is often difficult to discover and eliminate.