Wall warts, the scourge of the modern world

2004-08-06 10:08 - Rants

We all know them. We all hate them. There are even wall wart removers. They are terribly inconvenient. These huge black plastic knobs that demand all our valuable electric plug space. They have to go! Some companies are smart enough to make the snake-just-ate-a-mouse style warts, that leave a foot or two of cord between the plug and the wart. That makes them usable, if still bulky and inconvenient. But I hate putting effort into planning which place each thing plugs in just to make them all squeeze in. With 3 computers plus accessories on a desk, 3 power strips to plug things into, I have to be very careful where I plug things in. The icky warts, of course, have to go on the end, or they gobble up two, sometimes three, plugs. The horror! It's also possible to use old style grounding adapters to space yourself out, I've piggybacked warts that way. The adapter gives the second wart room to reach down to the plug over the first wart.

The worst thing is that wall warts could be much much smaller. But we're stuck in our 60hz electric supply world. Too many things rely on it now, so we can't change it. I will spare you the technical details, but if we ran on higher frequency AC, the wall warts could be much smaller and lighter. Enough so that they could easily be built in and almost beyond noticable. If only.

Comments:

Inertia
2004-08-06 11:14 - Lieuallen
Much like the "qwerty" keyboard (and Windows!) -- it's not a particuarly good design, but it's what we've got and it's so widespread that it would be a huge effort to replace....

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