Standby Current 10 A, Typical: Fill & Download for Free

If you pay attention to total current ratings, you should be OK. Check the label to see what the maximum current rating actually is - some power strips are rated for only 10 A, some go up to 15 A (in North America). That’s 1200 or 1800 VA.The total load on each of the “branch” power strips should not exceed the ratings of that strip. The “parent” strip carries all the load of all the plugged-in devices, and that should also be below the maximum.For example, I have 3 power strips plus one standby power supply (which is effectively another power strip, since it has many outlets) that power my desktop computer at home and the collection of stuff that surrounds it. Everything plugs into a duplex wall outlet.There is one power strip which is not protected by the standby supply. It provides power to a couple of desk lamps and my coffee warmer. The lamps are LED-based, so the maximum load on that strip is under 25 W - hardly worth worrying about.The standby supply feeds a second power strip for loads that I want to be protected from brief power interruptions. The system power supply is plugged into that, plus two monitors. System power consumption under light load is about 115 W, rising to ~240 W under maximum load (e.g. video encoding). The monitors have LED backlights, and their power consumption is about 40 W typical, 75 W maximum (each). So the three main loads add up to 195 W when the system is loafing (web browsing and email) while the worst case is about 390 W.There are several other small loads plugged into the “system” power strip as well: a speaker system, a headphone amplifier, and an external disk dock. Oh, plus a network switch. Then there is a third power strip plugged into the system one, which supplies power to a table where I sometimes add a laptop computer. And there is an iPad charger and a cordless phone charger plugged into it most of the time. Now, the laptop power supply can draw about 75 W, the iPad charger maybe 15, cordless phone 5, speakers and headphone amps maybe 15 w each, disk dock 10 W. In the worst case, all this extra stuff adds up to perhaps 135 W - but most of the time it will be under 50 W.So, I really need 3 power strips, partly because of the split between battery-backed-up and non-backed-up devices, but mostly because there are a lot of things to plug in. Also, there are a lot of “wall wart” type power supplies, which often cover two adjacent outlets, so you can’t really plug 8 things into an 8-outlet strip.However, I calculate that the maximum electrical load with *everything* turned on at once, and the computer under heavy computing load, is only slightly more than 500 W - far below the 1200 W limit of a power strip rated at 10 A, and even further below the wall outlet rating of 1800 W (15 A). So there is no possibility of overloading anything, no matter what I plug into where.I use power strips elsewhere in the house, but nowhere else do I have this many loads all in one spot. I do pay attention to the total current needed when setting up a power strip.By the way, this applies to extension cords too: most of our extension cords are 16 gauge wire, which is OK up to 10 A or so of load. But I will switch to 14 gauge for a 15-amp load, or 12 gauge for longer distances.

No one wanted it.This is the Energizer P18K Pop Smartphone… yup, a smartphone. With an 18,000mAh Li-ion battery, it offered 50 days of cellular standby time. Based on a mid-range MediaTek Helio P70 SOC and a moderate LCD resolution of 1080 x 2280 pixels, you might expect it to make it two weeks on a charge. My ZTE Axon 10 Pro manages a typical 3 days from a 4000mAhr battery, more DRAM, and a higher-end processor. That’s certainly brute-forcing it, but what other option do you have?This one, however, is real. This is the Blackview BV9100, which sports a 12000mAh built-in battery (labelled 13000mAh, but 12000mAh in testing), with 30W wired charging, in a rugged case. They sell this as an “outdoor smartphone.” It’s running the MediaTek Helio P35 processor, a low-end 8 core processor, all cores ARM Cortex A53, along with 4GiB RAM (LPDDR4X) and 64GB flash (eMMC). So certainly usable, and available for about $250. While not terribly obvious from the photo, this phone is 19.45mm thick and 408g. Not as barking mad as the Energizer phone, but you’re going to know you’re carrying this one, and it’s probably more at home in cargo pants than skinny jeans. But speaking of skinny jeans, an iPhone 11 Pro is, by comparison, is 8.1mm thick and 188g.You’re relatively in luck if you want one of these for use on AT&T or T-Mobile, at least in the USA. Previously, most of these specialty rugged Chinese phones from Blackview, Ulephone, Umidigi, etc. were only available as international models. So you didn’t have most of the recent LTE bands, and your 4G performance would suffer. I did a quick check of the BV9100 and it seems to have all of the T-Mobile bands, a big improvement. This is always a thing to check, even if you’re just picking up a phone like this to take on hikes, to music festivals, all those things we did before the lockdown that threatened an everyday phone on battery life and, well, the survival of a $1,000+ phone in a harsh environment.But rather than get crazy, this can be solved in part by design, but only in part. My Honor Magicwatch 2 last around 1.5–2 weeks on a charge, which isn’t bad given that quite a few smart watches don’t last a full day. How do they do this? Well, part of it’s the same idea as the Energizer — it’s got a battery that’s twice the size of that of some other smartwatches. Though not so huge it’s noticably larger than the type of watch I used to wear, well, back when people wore plain old watches. It doesn’t run WiFi or cellular. It has a much lower power, lower performance processor than an Apple Watch, and it’s running a set of apps defined by Honor/Huawei, not any 3rd party apps. So in one sense it’s limited. But in another, it’s way more useful simply because what it does, it does usefully long enough that I can rely on it working, rather than always needing a charge. So some of it’s correctly defining the scope of the device.That approach is more or less taken on the HiSense A5, a so-called “reading smartphone.” This phone swaps out the typical OLED or LCD display for a 1440 x 720 monochrome e-paper display. It runs a low-end Snapdragon 439 processor and includes a largeish 4000mAh battery. You’re not going to get useful video on-screen, web pages might rending rather dubious, etc. But you might see close to two weeks battery life from this one, in part due to the big battery and display, in part due to the fact you can’t burn power on video or complex games with much success.But if you’re asking for a thin, flagship-spec phone with a two-week battery life, you can’t have one. Battery technology for such a thing hasn’t been invented yet, and simply may never exist.That doesn’t mean someone’s not trying to deliver a better battery. But these things tend to take decades to get right. The next one up might be the graphene battery. Samsung has been working with “graphene ball” battery technology that would mean 12 minute full charging (as of their latest specs) and maybe a 60% longer run time for the same battery size. However, this is still a li-ion battery, just with their current carbon-over-silicon anode replaced by a graphene ball anode. That still doesn’t get you your 2-week phone in a normal smartphone size, but maybe Energizer would take another crack at it!Unfortunately, the Internet has a collective ability to embue every unreleased technology with all of the things everyone wants it to offer. So you may read of graphene or some other battery maybe delivering a month’s phone operation. You may also be lead to belive that a graphene battery is something fundamentally new, rather than just a tweak of the li-ion receipe, much as your “LED” or “Quantum Dot” monitor is still an LCD monitor, just with a few tweaks. Don’t count on big change, because fundamentally different battery chemistries are only rarely achieved. Li-ion batteries were theorized in the 1970s and built at the lab level by the mid-1980s. This is very different than the rest of the phone technology, based on the evolution of chip architecture. Next year’s phone gets faster just because we do the same exact thing as this year’s phone, just with another year of design technology under our collective belt, and maybe a smaller transistor size.And real progress means several things all at once. Lower power displays have helped, whether an e-paper display or an OLED display in a dark theme. But can you live with that? 5G-NR promises a lower power, higher performance radio, but it’ll take another generation or two to get there, just as LTE has delivered lower power, higher performance over 3G, but it took a few generations of chips. Memory and CPU technology delivers better power for the same performance in each generation, but we generally ask for more performance at the same power consumption, more or less, so a real demand for long running phones has to materialize and drive development in that direction. We’ve seen special functional units, GPUs, DSPs, ISPs, Neural Processors, etc. lower the power it takes a smartphone (or other computer) to do the same work, but we rarely ask it to only do the same work it did last year.In short, most folks are pretty much okay with a phone that needs to be charged every night. The things necessary to extend battery life, even with better batteries, are not going to be all that generally popular if they come at the cost of features. Faster charging and longer battery longevity would be easy wins, but I suspect a higher capacity battery just gets used by most companies to do more work at the same battery life. Especially considering how much faster electronics moves than the chemistry-based battery technology.Read MoreEnergizer Power Max P18K Pop Is a Smartphone With an 18000mAh Battery; It’s the Size of a Brick, but There’s No Audio JackEnergizer phone's beefy battery lasts "weeks" on a chargeGraphene batteries: What are they and why are they a big deal?Samsung Develops Battery Material with 5x Faster Charging SpeedSamsung Develops 900Wh Solid-State Batteryhttps://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/11/lithium-ion-storage-is-here-to-stay-with-no-post-li-ion-era-in-sight/

You are correct, the refrigerator is one of the biggest energy users in a home. If the refrigerator is older than 2009, you should seriouslly consider replacing it with a new energy efficient model that meets your needs.Aside from the refrigerator, the other big energy users in the home are HVAC (furnace, air conditioning, fans), dishwasher, lights (as a whole) electric stove/oven, TV entertainment centers, computers (specifically gaming rigs), washing machines and dryers, and plug load (all those device chargers).Things you can do to reduce/eleimnate energy use when not needed:Run your dishwasher after 10 pm. This won’t save energy directly, but will change when you use it to a cheaper time of day. The most expensive time of day to use electricity is from ~5pm to ~930pm.Increase your thermostat set point while away. This means going from 72F when the AC is running to 76F, or, better yet, turn it off completely if possible. Likewise, during the heating season going from 70F down to 68F or 66F will help save energy. If there is a risk of freezing, never let your thermostat go below 55F.Use ceiling or box fans to ventilate the home rather than run the AC if possible. Moving air, even warm air, allows the body to feel more comfortable. And fans are generally much less energy intensive than running AC. You can also set your thermostat to use just the fan without running the AC portion which is a middle ground.Electric stoves/ovens use a huge amount of energy to cook. That is their design, to convert electrical energy into heat. Not much to be done here other than use it as little as possible during the high rate times. You may be able to convert to natural gas, which is easier to cook with, but not always feasible.Your lights are a big portion of what consumes energy in a home. Depending on the age of your home the lighting can be very inefficient compared to the current LED technology out there. LEDs have come down significantly in price, and while still more than a typical incandescent bulb, make economic sense to replace. If you can, replace every bulb in your house at once and you will never have to change a bulb again. If that is not easy to do, buy a package of bulbs and as the old ones burn out replace them with LEDs. If you are replacing CFLs be aware that they contain mercury and should be properly recycled and not just thrown in teh trash. A side note, LEDs come in many colors of white most people find the 2700K to 3000K lights to be most appealing to the eye for the home. The higher the number (up to 6000K) the brighter white you will have. The lower the number the warmer or “orangier” the light will be.Entertainment centers have more and more boxes that are plugged in and constantly on. Xbox, Playstation, Tivo, cable boxes, modems, routers, storage devices, sound bar, bigger and bigger TVs… The list goes on and on. If you can live with turning something off completely when not in use this will help save a significant amount of standby energy loss. And when you consider purchasing new electronics add energy efficiency to your criteria, specifically for TVs.Computers are getting smaller and smaller. But leaving that power block plugged in while you are at work, still sucks up ~0.5 to 1 watt of power just to be plugged in. Unplug it when not in use. And if you use a large desktop for more computing intensive uses, like gaming or A/V editing, when you don’t need the high functionality, change the setting to be in as high an energy efficient mode as possible. Turning your screen brightness down even 25% will save you about the same in energy use and you may not even notice the difference.Washing machines and dryers, similarly, if you need to replace them, get the most energy efficient models you can. Otherwise try to use them out side of peak times or on the weekends when energy rates are typically lower.Last is the general category of “plug load” which includes everything above but also all the other things in your house that are plugged into electricity. Things like lamps, water coolers or filters, coffee pots, kitchen gadgets, device chargers, night lights, space heaters or coolers, speakers, personal fans, office equipment. Again, the list goes on and on. All of these things, generally, consume a certain amount of energy when not in use to be ready for you to come and use it. So when you don’t need something or will be away for a longer period of time unplug it. I use TP-Link wireless outlet switches to effectively unplug my standby devices when not in use. I can control them from my phone anywhere. I can even have the utility company turn them off for me when they need to reduce the load on the grid, and I get paid for it.When we are getting more and more devices in our homes that are connected and always on (digital assistants and more) it is good to consider the effect of these devices on your utility bill. The largest consumers of electricity in a typical home is still the HVAC system, refrigerator and lights. But a fast growing component is the plug load, which in some homes already surpasses the refrigerator and lighting use.To wrap up, some single items use a large amount of energy by them selves. But in aggregate, things like lighting and plug load consume significantly more energy than your refrigerator or even you AC. I hope this helps give you some insights and ideas about how to reduce your home energy load.PS. All of these ideas apply to areas outside of the home. But the systems are typically bigger. So there is more impact.