Sunday 20 May 2007

How many plugs does one study need...

This morning I was sat in my study and I noticed how many plugs I was actually using. By my estimates my study which is used by Hayley and myself has the following electrical appliances: 1 Tower PC, 2 LCD monitors, 1 Laptop, 3 Printers, 1 Surround set, 1 Modem, 1 Router, 1 Cordless Phone + Charging Station, 1 External HDD, 1 PDA Charger, 1 Mobile Phone Charger and 1 Free Standing Lamp. Now each of these have a plug so that means in one small study I need 15 plugs just to use everything, is it me or is that insane! Now when Hayley and I moved into our house we chose the study room as the study compared to the slightly larger spare room as it has 2 double sockets compared to just the one in the spare room. But even so it's still 1 four-way per socket. Luckily most of the appliances are low amp low drain devices otherwise this one room could end up costing me a fortune. Is it me or in this digital age shouldn't we be able to cut down on the amount of plugs needed? Surely there's a better way? For instance, a DVD Player, XBox, TV Set Top Box etc all need to plug into a TV, be this LCD, Plasma, CRT, you get the gist. Why not build into our TV's a modular power supply so that these devices along with the required audio/video connectors a simple power connector could be included. Not only would this save on all those untidy cables being everwhere but also save on the amount of plugs and unsafe multi-ways which are always overloaded. This idea could be developed for PC's, we have modular power supplys for the internal components but why not the external? LCD's use alot less power than CRT's, Printers are relatively low drain why not as well as our trusted USB connection have another power connection that can be plugged into our power supply but on the exposed side. Again less cabling, better use of cables etc. It's not like these devices would exceed the 3.2Kw of a plug socket anyway, as multi-ways cant! Anyway its an interesting idea, I wonder if we will ever see something like this. I hope so.

2 comments:

Derek Fowler said...

I'm not sure whether they make them any more but you used to be able to get PSU's with a female power connector that you could plug your monitor into with a special cable.

As for printers and chargers there are USB bus powered devices available - primarily meant for laptop use I think but they exist.

HDMI also includes 5V bus power like USB so you could probably power a set-top box off that.

Michael James said...

Indeed they did, I used to have one old my old p2 however I believe as power consumption went up they opted to drop them.

Hopefully we will start seeing HDMI powered set top boxes, i was about to say for freeview but most tv's that have a HDMI interace already have a digital tuner :S