I just had this great idea for a (yet ficional) gadget called CHARGEKILL.
Imagine you had this device that goes between your charger and your socket. You’d have one device per charger, be that iPod, mobile, bluetooth headset, you name it. It cuts the power automatically once your appliance has stopped charging, hence saving energy. It would have to be cheap, say £4.99.
Here’s how it works:
You can measure at the charger if your appliance is sucking power or not. Becasue every appliance will vary in its power consumption, our gadget would need a learn function so you can tell it “now it’s charging, now it’s idle”. Once our gadget has cut the supply to the charger, it would either need a little power source of its own (maybe a charged capacitor, or a rechargable battery) or a timer so that once in a while it could check if we’ve put the appliance back on charge. If not, it remains off (or in stand-by), or it goes back to charging our actual device – that’s handy if you put your appliance back on charge overnight. Alternatively, we can provide a button that you need to press in order for our gadget to know when to come back to life and start providing your charger with power again.
If this thing comes out next week, you know who to thank for this!
Nobel Price material, say you?