 The premier Powerdown device! It simply switches stuff off! Brilliant! Is your home littered with appliances, Computers, TV and home entertainment systems that have no off switch? Is the only way to switch them off to move furniture to get at the socket? Do you have small children who love buttons and keep switching stuff on and off? Concerned about the fire hazard of so much electrical stuff always on? Sound familiar? Worried about the total Standby Power usage of all this junk?
We used a Power Monitor to measure the Standby Power usage of fifteen devices (in our Post-Carbon Home - just an average three bedroom house in the UK), that could be isolated with Bye Bye Standby, and the it came to 72 watts! It really adds up. You could easily light half your house with CFL's and use less power! What a waste. So what does Bye Bye Standby do? How does it work? It was actually never developed for the Energy Saving-conscious. It was an off-shoot of the Home Automation hobby. It is otherwise known as "Domia Lite". They simply rebranded it and repackaged it to open up an entirely new market for themselves. Those marketing people are dead clever. It uses wireless frequencies to remotely switch devices off at the plug. You have a choice of three different types of remote control. It works on sixteen separate frequencies so you can control areas of your house as a variety of different zones giving you more flexibility. All you need is to put one of their special plugs between your appliances and the normal wall socket. This would be expensive if it only allowed you to plug in one appliance. Thankfully you can use a strip gang of four sockets to multiple the devices it can be used with. The instructions warn against using more than four appliances with one BBSB plug but there is no good reason for that. These plugs are rated to switch a far higher amperage that you could possibly load it with for most appliances. Just don't plug in multiple 3kw fires or kettles! As a rule of thumb you can load each plug with 12 appliances as long as these are only TV's, Stereo, Computers, Peripherals, DVD's, etc. The Instructions also warn you not to plug the BBSB Plugs into anything other than a wall socket. However we have tried it with gang socket strips to no ill effect. Again, apply common sense and do not overload your sockets. The BBSB Units are quite robust and will take plenty of punishment. Just don't push your luck. One note of genuine warning though. Of the two remotes we used both batteries ran out within weeks of installation. We first feared that there was a large drain on them but the replacement batteries have lasted ever since. We think they fitted extremely cheap batteries in the retail packs with practically no life to them. The Batteries for these things sadly are not the rechargeable type. They are much small than AAA's in most remotes meaning you have to throw them away. This is a hangover from their origins as "Domia Lite". We look forward to a 'greener' alternative in future that will take conventional rechargeable batteries. One final point (in case you are wondering). We tested the BBSB Plugs for Standby Wattage and couldn't detect anything. For this reason we heartily recommend Bye Bye Standby - but hope they improve it in future. | 
