Brennenstuhl Primera Mesure de consommation d'énergie PM231E

I bought this on the basis that Brennenstuhl is a known and respected German brand. At this price I was not naive to think that it would be made in Germany as the majority of electrical products are now made in the PRC and this product is no exception. However I did expect a well made and reliable product made in China with German know-how and reasonable quality control, unfortunately what I got was a product that developed a fault after a few months of very light use. For £14 I'm really not going to through the ordeal of contacting the manufacturer, waiting for a reply, emails back and forth and then paying for the item to be returned for a possible replacement only to risk the same thing happening some months down the line. I bought a cheap unbranded plugin energy monitor years ago and it it worked fine for a number of years but eventually I gave it away to a friend who wanted to monitor his energy consumption.

It's a useful item that seems to be accurate as far as I can tell. In reality once you have checked all your items it will probably sit in a cupboard but it satisfied my curiosity to find out the power consumption of items plugged in but not actually switched on, in other words how much the power adapter uses. Turns out, contrary to some scaremongers, that most of our items don't actually consume that much, maybe 0.1W to 0.9 W. Though obviously if you leave lots of items on (we don't) then it adds up. Interestingly Apple items don't seem to use anything in standby. One or two items were an issue seeing the display because the block of the adapter hung below the socket obscuring the display panel but we managed to just about see the result.

Someone needs to think through the design of this. As you can see from the picture, there is a large portion of the device below the plug level, so if you have low sockets, then you can forget about using this. More stupidly, by definition the cable of anything you plug into this is going to hang down, and thus obscure the screen and the controls. Finally, the display is microscopically small and hard to read. The information it gives is useful: it's design leaves a lot to be desired.

Very useful piece of equipment, I tested loads of things to see how much electricity they need. The power factor function is very useful too and there are not many meters capable of measuring this. It seems to be very accurate. Highly recommended!