Dealing w/ Massively Multiplying Power Cables?

Darius Jedburgh asks: "Wireless networking is all very well but network cables make up only a small proportion of the cables in my house. When I come home ,I plug in my GBA Micro, PowerBook, Palm, cellphone and iPod to recharge alongside camera, and other devices. Meanwhile I have power adapters for PCs, routers, access points, cable modems, monitors and external hard drives. Every time I buy a new gadget there's another cable (or two) to install. How do people keep this proliferation under control? Are there any products available to help to organize and ease the distribution of power at home? Does anyone know of novel ideas in power distribution in current development that might make things easier in the future?"

Comments

Solution

[Hamster Of Death]

Buy less crap that you don't -really- need.

The economics are there for universal power

[plover]

You are only looking at chargers, though. Consider instead the fixed devices with power requirements under my desk right now. Cable modem, router, 3 USB hubs, three printers, a film scanner, a set of speakers, a weather station receiver, and a TV tuner. Each of those came with a brick because it needs power, and there is no local source they could count on. These companies could all save the cost of the bricks if they could count on the users having a universal power supply.

If a universal power system were widely adopted, all of these bricks could go away. The device makers would have every incentive to not include a brick with each device (cost, weight, package size, etc.)

The almighty buck is an economic incentive only for the brickmakers -- they want to sell lots of power bricks. But they only sell wholesale to the device makers. They don't sell to the consumers, the device makers do. The device makers have it in their economic interest to offer the lowest price, not to sell a brick. If they could save two dollars by not buying bricks, they could drop their prices by one dollar and still pocket one dollar for themselves.

There is already a standard out there: USB PlusPower for cash registers. They've incorporated USB backward compatible piggybacked high-current +5VDC, +12VDC and +24VDC connectors. Several years ago some large retail chain stores refused to accept a half-dozen power bricks under each cash register, and demanded of IBM that they develop a way to power the many peripherals each cash register needs (scanners, printers, mag stripe readers, PIN pads, cash drawers, scales, etc.) NCR and Fujitsu added their support for a standard, and USB PlusPower was the result. All the large-player peripheral makers support it now, too. (Here's a sales document for a USB PlusPower hub for your PC that explains the standard.

From the document: "The USB PlusPower design provides the following voltage and current

• +5 volts DC at up to 6 amps per connector (up to 30 Watts)
• +12 volts DC at up to 6 amps per connector (up to 72 Watts)
• +24 volts DC at up to 6 amps per connector (up to 144 Watts)"

Consumers need to do the same thing, but as of yet have never organized and demanded such a thing. It's considerably tougher to do at a consumer level. Consumers have never organized very well. And there are very few cash register manufacturers in comparison to all the motherboard and system builders out there. There are very few "large customers" that can use their buying power to influence the industry.