A simple energy saver

One common cause of wasted electricity is when devices are left on unnecessarily, but there is a simple way to avoid that, writes Lance Turner.

The bathroom of our old weatherboard home has a simple light fitting in the ceiling, with an exhaust fan in an outside wall. This works fine, but heating was being done with a portable radiator—not exactly ideal in a bathroom.

Some years ago I fitted a wall-mounted radiator plugged into the power point above the bathroom bench, but it often got left on for longer than needed.

I investigated what timer options were available at the time, and there seemed to be nothing available that simply plugged in between the power point and the load, where you could hit a start button and have it time out after a set period. There were [overpriced] hardwired options, but no plug-in units.

So, of course, I resorted to looking online, and finding nothing in Australia, I went to AliExpress and immediately found exactly what I was looking for in the form of a simple plug-in unit with a single button (tinyurl.com/yz4xpd9p). The timer turns on when you press the button, and turns off after the elapsed time. There are six time settings—1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 hours. Press the button once for one hour, twice for two hours, thrice for four hours, etc. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

My only concern was what the quality would be like, so when the timers arrived (I bought two, for a grand total of $22 including shipping), I opened one up and discovered a device with better quality than many of the “approved” devices available on the Australian market. There was no brittle phenolic resin PCB here (which I’ve seen on many approved devices in Australia), just a nice fibreglass board with appropriate safety slots between the various high voltage sections, a 16A relay (I have bought many approved remote switches and similar devices and they all had 10A relays that eventually failed—the 16A relay gives a nice overhead), good quality, thick copper mains contacts and correctly insulated plug pins. In short, this unit would pass approvals in a second, so I was happy to put it to good use.

And that was over two years ago, and it is still operating like new, used twice a night, pretty much every night (because the bathroom is always cold here in NW Tassie). I can’t imagine how much energy this unit has saved us over the years, but it would be a lot. For anyone who has a habit of leaving potentially hazardous devices like heaters and clothes irons running, these little timers could literally be a lifesaver.

But, sadly, technically they don’t carry the little approval stamps that even the dodgiest of “approved” appliances have (like the aforementioned wall-mounted heater, which should never have been approved, but that’s another story). But, they are well designed and safe (if anyone knows if any importer has had these approved for use in Australia, please let us know!).

So, what can you do if you want to keep it legal? Well, there is a way, and that way is smart plugs.

We also use a number of Tapo P100 smart plugs on various devices in the home to turn them on and off, mostly to avoid peak-rate tariff times. One of the features of the Tapo app is the ability to add smart actions, and one of those actions is “Auto Off”, which lets you set any smart plug to simply turn off after a designated time period after you manually turn it on. So, in a way, it works like the unit above, but you can only set one smart action time period at a time, and you need the app to set it all up first, as well as if you want to change the timer period, so it’s definitely not as convenient as having six different timer periods available at the press of a button. But, the Tapo units are cheap (around $20 each), compact and easy to use.