With all these “green” products being released now you would think the planet’s climate would be all set.  We’ve got everything from eco-friendly bikinis, big “green” bombs, and magically “clean” coal. Now One for All has joined the green product blitz with their Energy Saver Remote — a salvo against the “stand by power consumption” issue that has become a craze of late.

Basically the Energy Saver Remote is a fairly generic four-device universal remote with a big green button. This green button controls an outlet extender that you plug a power strip in for your entertainment system. When you are done watching TV, instead of having to manually switch off (or unplug) all the devices to fight the “vampire power,” this remote will simply shut off the power strip. Of course this prevents any of the devices from entering stand-by mode (well, almost — the outlet extender still uses stand by power, but not much…).

You might have been able to tell that I’m having a hard time getting behind this product. To me it just feels like “greenwashing” from top to bottom.  If you really want to be green, why not just flip the switch that’s already on the power strip instead of spending (GBP)£33 for another universal remote?  Use that money to buy a water filter. Or maybe a couple of those wireless outlets. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be vigilant on issues like stand-by power because every little bit helps, but our time and money can be spent elsewhere for a bigger effect. Wouldn’t manually shutting things off be more “green” than having these products created and manufactured to make shutting off a power strip easier?

Green issues aside, there are other problems here. For example, anyone with a set-top box for cable or satellite TV is going to have problems with this remote, because when these lose power, it takes about a half an hour for them to restore the channel guide information. Presumably restoring that data requires some server somewhere to send the information over – which probably consumers more electricity than all those devices on stand-by. Of course I could fix this by plugging it in somewhere else and not having it tied to the same power strip, but since it looks like these set-top boxes are leaders in stand-by power consumption, I feel like it would be missing the point completely.