The Energy Egg

The Claim

When used with an energyEGG, high end home entertainment systems can achieve savings of up to £119. If, on top of this, lights are added, then the energyEGG could achieve an additional £20 of savings. This brings the potential annual savings of an energyEGG device to £139, at current electricity prices. This saving is set to increase significantly in line with rises in electricity costs.

How does it work?

The energyEGG is comprised of two parts, the first is an adapter that sits between your power strip plug and the electrical socket. The other part is a controller that detects when the room is empty and sends a message to the adapter shutting off any power running through it, obviously anything connected to the adapter (i.e. the power strip) is therefore also switched off.

It has a time delay built in, so you can set the time before the controller sends the adapter a message when it knows the room is empty, to ensure that if you nip to make a cup of tea you can come back and everything will still be on.

How did it work for me?

About 7 years ago I sold my car and bought a big 42inch TV for the world cup. Looking back this was an extremely extravagant purchase, but it has bought me a lot of joy since! Over the years numerous gadgets have been added to add to my ‘home entertainment’ system, including a sky box, PlayStation, DVD player and a home phone. All of these items are plugged into an electrical strip, drawing power off one mains plug socket.

I received my EnergyEGG (solo) through the post 2 months ago and so installed it on my home entertainment system. It was really simple to install, you simply plug the electrical strip through the adapter into the mains socket.

Once this is done you position the energy egg unit so that the detector is pointing towards the room. This is what tracks the movement to ensure it only goes off if you have left the room for a certain amount of time. I set the timer on the bottom of the device to half an hour to ensure if I nipped out of the room it wouldn’t turn off everything. The half hour is the maximum setting you can choose to ensure it still automatically turns off. I was worried that me sitting on the couch for half an hour might turn it off, but in the two months I’ve used the Egg, it has never turned off whilst I was in the room.

So the device does exactly what it offers – it turns off everything at the socket as soon as it detects no motion for the chosen amount of time. It starts quietly beeping to let you know that it is about to turn off.  For me the major thing here was to ensure that everything was turned off from when we go to bed at night to when we come home the next evening from work. It works really well, doing exactly that. Once I get home, I have to press the button on top of the energyEGG and everything comes back to life.

The only issue is that if you do go away for over 30 mins, (e.g. nipping to the shop) then you will come back to everything switched off. It then takes time for the sky box to boot up – this is obviously not the fault of the energyEgg, but worth noting nevertheless. Also if you are recording programs via your Sky+ during the middle of the night or during times when you are away it won’t work so you may want to plug this one appliance into the electrical socket independently from the rest of your gadgets.

Another thing I avoided was plugging the broadband router through the energy egg, since I like having this connection on all the time – but again this was a personal thing!

On the whole the energyEGG does work fantastically well; since I am yet to get my quarterly bill, it is difficult to judge the exact savings, but I assume since everything is now off for 18 hours a day as opposed to on (albeit in standby) all day – I should see some nice savings. You can also control up-to 12 socket adapters from one egg.