Electricity. It’s pricey, we pay in excess of £40 per month on average per household and that figure is only going up. Over the pond and the ever-spiraling cost of power is hitting our American friends hard too. So much so that Monster have developed the Power Control, a smart bit of kit that controls electrical devices in your home via an iOS or Android application in a bid to save power, save money and save the world.
Once you’ve got the main Power Control box, connect your appliances / media centre / other electricals to it and 
you can set a profile for the each bit of kit you connect. Once set up, simply automate when it will switch on and off by time, or on the fly. While this will potentially save a fair bit of cash, on a practical level, it’s also a lazy man’s best friend, offering the capability to turn of your electrical’s remotely, whether you’re in bed or abroad.
Demonstrated at the Monster show here at CES with a Power Control, an iPad and a lamp, a member of the Monster team added the lamp to the Power Control app, named it “Lamp”, switched it on, then switched it off to a rapturous applause.
To complement the core functionality of the Monster Power Control and the iPad app, there is also an iPhone and Android app due later this month with a range of views that indicate how much power a single item has used, grids and graphs and total spend calculator.
What’s great for us is that there’s a Europe wide launch expected later in 2012 with pricing and details expected from Monster in the coming months. If you’re in the US, you’ll be able to get the Monster Power Control and download the app from the iPhone app store / Android Market towards the end of January. In the meantime, it looks like we’ll have to carry on tirelessly getting up off our seats in order to turn off the light, never mind eh – one day life will be sedentary and our electricity bills will be cheaper – hurry up Monster.
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