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Step 9Re-assembly, Testing, and Savings Calculations
Reassembly
Reassemble the power bar making sure your wires are out of the way of all outlets and screw mounts and that the two pieces of the power bar housing still fit together nicely.
Testing
It's a good idea as a first test to plug the power bar into another power bar. That way if you inadvertently short circuited anything, you'll just trip the power bar breaker instead of your house circuit breaker.
Try plugging a lamp or other appliance into each outlet and test if you can control the outlets you want. Also check to see that the switch illuminates correctly (if it is always illuminated, then you swapped pins 1 and 2 in the schematic).
You may also wish to label which outlets are "switched" and which are "always on". It doesn't take long to forget.
Savings Calculations
Let's assume that an average remote power switch installation eliminates 15W of standby power. Assume further that the equipment is in use 40 hours a week (an office computer setup for example). Therefore, there are 128 hours a week when the equipment would normally have been in standby mode. That corresponds to 99.84 kWh per year. At roughly $0.07 per kWh (the price where I live), that is a savings of about $7.00 per year.
Therefore the time till payback on materials alone is at least a couple years. It's probably 5-6 years if you value your own time at a reasonable rate. But it does pay back eventually, and if you are running a lot of equipment (for example if you have a home business) the savings start to become significant.
There's also the convenience and coolness factor of turning off multiple pieces of equipment with a custom mounted illuminated switch. Honestly... you'll be surprised how much fun you'll have turning your equipment on and off once you install one of these switches.
For information on this and other projects of mine see my website IWillTry.org.
Reassemble the power bar making sure your wires are out of the way of all outlets and screw mounts and that the two pieces of the power bar housing still fit together nicely.
Testing
It's a good idea as a first test to plug the power bar into another power bar. That way if you inadvertently short circuited anything, you'll just trip the power bar breaker instead of your house circuit breaker.
Try plugging a lamp or other appliance into each outlet and test if you can control the outlets you want. Also check to see that the switch illuminates correctly (if it is always illuminated, then you swapped pins 1 and 2 in the schematic).
You may also wish to label which outlets are "switched" and which are "always on". It doesn't take long to forget.
Savings Calculations
Let's assume that an average remote power switch installation eliminates 15W of standby power. Assume further that the equipment is in use 40 hours a week (an office computer setup for example). Therefore, there are 128 hours a week when the equipment would normally have been in standby mode. That corresponds to 99.84 kWh per year. At roughly $0.07 per kWh (the price where I live), that is a savings of about $7.00 per year.
Therefore the time till payback on materials alone is at least a couple years. It's probably 5-6 years if you value your own time at a reasonable rate. But it does pay back eventually, and if you are running a lot of equipment (for example if you have a home business) the savings start to become significant.
There's also the convenience and coolness factor of turning off multiple pieces of equipment with a custom mounted illuminated switch. Honestly... you'll be surprised how much fun you'll have turning your equipment on and off once you install one of these switches.
For information on this and other projects of mine see my website IWillTry.org.
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0.14 per kWh where i live