More Cool Stuff From the Grand Designs Live Show

If you're vaguelly interesting keeping polar bears from losing it's natural habitat, and reducing your carbon footprint, then this device is one cool little gadget. Called Bye Bye Standby it works by 'reducing daily energy consumption on electrical devices by completely cutting power to the devices plugged into it when they're not in use thus saving the power that these devices would otherwise have consumed in Standby Mode'.

Seriously it is really, really cool. Basically, it's an adapter you plug the power board to which powers things like your telly or dvd player. You then get a remote switch which works within a 30m range of the device, so you can then just turn off all your appliances in one go. The coolest part is that you can have multiple of these devices all configured to one remote switch, so you can turn multiple electrical devices off at the same time. And this is exactly why I'm going to buy it! Yes, I am interested in reducing my carbon footprint (not so much so that I've gotten around to offsetting all the airplane trips I've taken this year yet, though I have calculated that it would cost me about £25 to offset them all. If you're interested in seeing how big your footprint sites like co2balance.com are good. To whom you should actually pay the money to I'm still unsure because I did quick check on google to find that loads of these offset companies are not necessarily the best places to give my hard earned mula to. Perhaps just donating that money to recognised charities that actually do good conservation work might be the answer.. If anyone has any ideas let me know, and yes the obvious 'just don't take planes' is good, but in reality, I'm not about to stop doing that just yet..)

I digress. I'm going to buy the Bye Bye Standby not only for it's green factor, but because it is the perfect solution to the following tricky problems:

1. How to turn on and off the tv in my bedroom without having to get out of bed now that I've lost the remote control, because I am lazy.
2. How to have multiple little lamps in my bedroom and lounge room to create little pockets of mood lighting and and be able to turn them all on and off in one go, thus avoiding having to go around the room and do them individually, without having to spend a fortune on an electrician to rewire the whole house.

It's a fantastic find!!