On Our Desk - 13

OneClick Intelliplug

Manufacturer: OneClick
UK Price (as reviewed): PC and TV £16.94 each, two for £29 or three for £39 excluding Delivery. bit-tech shopping: £19.95 (Inc. Delivery)

I’m sure you don’t need this, really. I’m sure you are a responsible, smart person who never does something stupid like leaving the lights on when you go on holiday to ‘scare off robbers’ or leaving your PC on all the time in high-performance mode.

It’d be foolish to imply that you’re the type of person who always leaves their monitors and speakers on or in standby…oh, wait. Is that you Tim? Fine, I take it back. You definitely need this.

The Intelliplug isn’t something a reasonable, responsible world should need, but then again neither are guns and in a world where everyday we see people shooting each other in the face there’s obviously going to be a computer screen or two left on standby.

The Intelliplug aims to curb this problem however by devising a switching system inside the plug that automatically turns off attached peripherals when the PC is turned off. In other words, when the PC is turned off at the end of the night then monitor and speakers will automatically power-off too. Apparently, a PC monitor on standby overnight uses the same amount of energy as microwave would need to cook six dinners.


What really interests us though is that the system also works in reverse; turn your PC on in the morning and the screen and speakers will boot up automatically too, saving effort.

As a concept then, it’s as simple as you could hope it to be and in practice it’s about the same; incredibly simple. It literally is a case of plugging your Master Device, in this case the PC, in the top and your extra devices in the side. The only drawback of the design is that there’s only room for two extra plugs, so if you’ve got a multi-monitor set up then you’ll have to leave something behind or plug an extension cable in to one of these side-sockets.

The second drawback of the Intelliplug is that it isn’t a case of one size fits all and if you want to use the same system for your TV and consoles then you’ll need a TV Intelliplug. We had a brief fiddle with one of these and it’s essentially the same thing except that one plug is devoted solely to a Sky or Freeview digibox and it comes with an IR sensor that you can program to respond with your remote control.


All in all, the Intelliplug is a useful little device then and should do a fair bit to help reduce the £740 million worth of energy that is wasted every year by systems left on standby instead of being turned off.

The premise however is a little flawed for the most part in that, in our experience, PC users fall into two categories. There are those who won’t benefit from the Intelliplug at all as they make sure they always power down their systems fully and turn off their monitors from the mostly pointless standby mode. Secondly, there’s the type of people who won’t benefit from the Intelliplug because they always leave their PCs and peripherals on. We’ll call the latter group, ‘The Tims’.

Still, the Intelliplug is a nifty little power and money saving device, so we’ll just assume there’s a third, forgetful type of person out there and we’ll throw our recommendation on this anyway. It’s small, cheap, effective and helpful, so you can’t really argue with that.

Verdict: Helpful and useful, the Intelliplug will practically pay for itself over time.