Green Plug would rid your home of wall warts
If you’re like most modern day homeowners, somewhere in your house is a pile of power adaptors, also known as wall warts, used to charge all the various electronic devices that you have bought over the years.
Wouldn’t it be nice to just have one power adaptor that worked for all your devices so that every time you bought an electronic device, you knew you already had a external power adaptor to power it?
That is the goal of a San Ramon California company called Green Plug, developer of smart technology that enables consumers electronic devices to tell the power adaptor what type of power they need.
Presently, there is no common interface between DC-powered devices such as cell phones, PDAs, laptops, printers, digital cameras, camcorders, cordless drills, and MP3 players and power adaptors.
The result is consumer electronics companies are churning out some 2.5 billion incompatible power supplies and burying another 700 million discarded units in landfills annually.
When embedded in any consumer electronic device, which includes a common connector, Green Plug’s technology would determine what type of power is required by a device and sends instructions to a universal power supply.
With a universal power supply, the number of power supplies ending up in landfill would plunge dramatically, consumer electronics manufacturers would save money by not having to ship an external DC power supply with every device and homeowners would be free from the hassle of trying to figure out which device works with which power supply.
The need for such a device seems obvious to most home owners, however, in order for it to work, consumer electronics manufacturers must agree to embed the technology in their devices along with a common connector.
Discuss Green Plug in our Home Automation and Energy Savings forum.
I won’t hold my breath… manufactures love charging $30 for a charger that costs them less than $1 to make.