I have a question that might sound a little weird up front. I’ll explain “why” after the TL/DR marker.
Is there an outlet on/off switch that can control a surge protector that I have my home office plugged into and in another room, another protector for my entertainment center. The office protector has 2 4k monitors, my MacBook, a thunderbolt doc, some speakers, drive enclosures, an amazon show, etc Entertainment protector would be my big TV, tuner/amp, game consoles, etc. Would a “ZEN15 Power Switch” be something I could use here? I don’t need the independent control like the ZEN20 provides, I want to cut power to everything on that strip.
TL/DR;
The reason is that my house is now run behind solar and a Tesla battery. During a power outage, I’d like to have those “unnecessary devices” powered off by my home automation system (killing power to all those devices). When I’m not using anything in the house, I currently average a draw around 0.4Kw to keep everything in the house “turned on”. If I power those off, I can save about .2Kw. I know it’s not much, but it would buy me more time during an outage and/or when I’m away on a trip.
Hey @sparker, great question! The ZEN15 and all of our other smart plugs are designed to control and monitor a single device at a time. Multiple inductive loads with their rapid current changes happening at once, may damage the device or cause abnormal behavior. Our only recommendation here would be the ZEN20 Power Strip. This provides individual control of each outlet as well as the device as a whole.
Did I miss which system you are using? You could create a scene to control multiple things or plugs are items at a time
It kind of sounds like a lot of those things could be plugged into a energy saving power strip. Here is an example. I use them all over still despite basically all of the house being smart. Using one of these could cut down the amount of devices that need to be switched anyways, as most could be power off automatically anyways by the power strip.
There are 7 things (including bricks) plugged in to the Computer desk, and 8 things plugged into the entertainment center. That would be two outlet strips for each one. And I know that the Z-Wave switched outlets don’t like things like transformers (think USB bricks), etc.
So it’s looking like the power strip may not be a viable solution.
Thanks for the speedy reply. That power detecting switch is looking like something I might try. I live in lightning country (Colorado) so I’m looking for insured surge protection type devices for these two things, but I never even considered things like you mentioned (I didn’t know they existed). I’m definitely going to start reading up on those.