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- Verified Buyer
I have had this product for 6 years and have all of my desk accessories, 2 monitors, Powered speakers, desk lamp all plugged into the switched plugs. My computer, external hard drives are in the always on outlets. First thing I do in the morning with coffee in hand is press the little remote button and viola all of the individual peripherals are ready to go. If I forget to shut down, the switch automatically turns everything off after (I think) 11 hours.I have another one I installed on my wife's desk and they both have worked flawlessly for years.Last summer we received an electric bill for $450. As you can imagine we pooped our pants. Well the very next month a $500+ bill showed up and after we picked ourselves off the floor we decided that things needed to change.We started by getting a Kill-a-watt to measure where we were wasting power and we were shocked at what was consuming ridiculous amounts of power.The first thing we discovered was that the kids were killing us watching TV! First you have the receiver, a power amp, the Tivo a subwoofer and possibly the dvd player all going at once.I did 2 things first I ran the HDMI cables directly to the TV instead of plugging it into the receiver that way the kids can watch TV or movies without powering the whole system up that alone saved huge $$.Secondly by plugging in the receiver, subwoofer and amplifier directly into one of these power strips the units consumer ZERO power compared to the 60 watts they were drawing in standby.I also did the same thing in our loft. We have a 52" lcd up there for the kids to play xbox & Wii. The system doesn't get used regularly so being able to cut power to everything just makes good financial sense.In the office I use one of these to connect my 3 printers (a color inkjet a laser and a label printer)In our master BR I use one to cut power to a 32" tv and a media player.I can't stress enough how happy I am with this product in fact with most of the Belkin conserve items. we use the I bought two of these to use with two home theatre systems. The benefits are (1) the surge protection, and (2) the ability to turn off the power to the connected devices to eliminate "vampire" standby power usage.A third, less obvious benefit to this is the ability to easily turn off power to your expensive home theatre equipment when there is a thunderstorm nearby. Even though this is a surge protector, surge protectors can only do so much, and lightning isn't going to be stopped by an inexpensive surge protector. The best protection would be to unplug the devices, or turn of the surge protector that they are connected to. So, I bought this thinking that if there is a thunderstorm nearby, I can easily turn off the power to the TV, which would provide more protection than "surge protection." But what if I'm not home?... well I bought the device with the 11-hour timer... this way, if we watch TV before going to bed, then it will turn off the power 11 hours later, which would be early in the morning when everyone is at work or school. If there is a thunderstorm during the day, hopefully the timer would have automatically turned off the power to the equipment to protect it from getting zapped by lightning.In case you're wondering, yes, I have had two televisions and other home electronic devices (that were not on surge protectors) that got zapped by power surges during thunderstorms over the years. I hope this Belkin surge protector will prevent this from happening again, even though Belkin's warranty on this product covers connected equipment up to $50,000 per occurrence.Great product. I use power conservation strips to allow my computer, when it comes on, to power up my monitor, printer and a couple other peripherals. When I migrated to a new computer that uses a laptop like external power supply, my old power strip trigger properly as the new computer didn't draw enough power. did not get enough, or when the computer went into sleep mode, the switched outlets would power down. This Belkin power bar eliminated all those issues. The only thing now is that when I turn off the computer, I have to wait for it to power off then manually turn off the power bar to turn off the other outlets. But, even if I forget to do so, the strip will turn itself off after a preset time period. It all sounds complicated, but really isn't and it suits my application very well.Good quality construction on the main body, and the timer works as expected. The cable for the switch coukd do with toughening up - started to fray at the join to the 3.5mm plug so I added reinforcing there. I really wish there was a way to use the 4main sockets without the button - it will break soon and I will only have two outlets in it.This is a bit patchy operationally. I don't like that you can't turn the timer off. I'd love to be able to use it as an on/off switch without the auto-offSometimes the button doesn't work that well and sometimes it turns itself off way early.Not that useableIt does what it says it would and when I shut down my PC and peripherals I save 100 watts every hour.works perfects ly
