Don't be a pig with your power usage

00:27 March 18, 2009 PDT

Power Hog

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Educating children about power usage can be a difficult task. It’s not easy explaining the concept of electricity to a five year old, let alone the fact that we have to pay for it. A cute little pig might help to solve this problem and monitor television and game usage at the same time.

Power Hog is a power-consumption meter design concept in the form of a green and silver piggy-bank. You simply plug the tail into the power outlet and the snout into the electric device, feed in some coins and this little piggy does the rest. When the Power Hog is connected the dollar sign glows green, it fades when there is sufficient credit and alerts you that money is running low by blinking red.

It is made from Xenoy grade resin from Sabic who use recycled PET. The packaging was developed in line with sustainable packaging guidelines, the pig itself is 100% recyclable and the cord is PVC free.

The Power Hog was designed by Mathieu Zastawny, Mansour Ourasanah, Tom Dooley, Peter Byar, Elysa Soffer and Mathieu Turpault and won second place in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition held in February, 2009.

OK, your kid may just unplug the pig and plug their device directly into the wall but in this age surely anything that heightens a child’s awareness of power usage is a positive.

Jude Garvey

Via Core 77.

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User Comments (1)

Huh? How many coins do you put in the thing? And if it's full, how do you get them out? And what about the coins shorting out the power?

I think that this is a VERY BAD idea! The last thing we need to teach a 5 year old is to stick metal coins in slots to get electricity! Imagine a kid who has this and then applies that logic to a standard wall socket...Armed with a fist full of dimes, or other metal items, he/she proceeds to shove them into the wall outlet...You say this won't ever happen? Talk to VCR repair people about the weird things they pulled out of VCR tape slots! Children love to stick things into other things...

And besides....This doesn't teach the kid about conserving...if anything, it teaches the kid that if you have the money, you can use up all the electricity you want! That's not a very eco-sensitive thing to teach your kid!

web/gadget guru

- March 19, 2009 @ 08:03 am