In our laundry room I set up a charging shelf for a motley collection of power tools of various sizes. It always bothered me that I had 6 batteries charging 24x7x365 regardless of whether they needed it or not. Some of them pretty big - an upright vacuum cleaner, string trimmer, blower/sweeper, drill/driver, etc.and I conservatively estimated this might be costing me $70+ per year (more on that at the bottom of this review). I also wasn't wild about the idea of no surge protection, so I set out to find some sort of timer.Originally, my idea was to put a programmable timer in line and figure out some Byzantine pattern that would catch the most likely scenarios for what charging would be needed, and when. Worst case, just have it turn off at night and save about 40+% of the power consumed. Then I came across this product, and it hit me. Every tool is powered by a Lithium ion battery, which has great charge retention. My experience shows that tools I haven't touched for weeks or months still had plenty of power left to do a job without recharging. I have some tools used frequently (vacuum), some used seasonally only (trimmer), some used intermittently (drill), etc. Pretty much any of them can charge in an hour. Then I thought: Why not just grab a battery when you need one, and charge it when you put it back? So, I dock the spent battery, hit the on button on the cube, recharge the empty, and all the nominally depleted batteries get a one hour top off. If I'm doing a "project day" I'm maybe hitting this thing 3 - 4 times, max. Very elegant and simple.I looked at the Belkin, but its 3 settings - 30 min, 3 hrs, 6 hrs didn't fit. Thirty minutes is too little, 3 hours is 3x too much. This has been working out great so far, and I figure I'm using roughly 4% of the power consumption I was using before. This thing probably pays for itself in 3 months. Generally speaking, I thought it was pretty solidly constructed (although I'd have to take it apart to really know), but I like the action of the power switch, and I trust Tripp Lite from my history with it. I like the form factor, and it's fairly attractive. Now I'm trying to think up some other applications for this product. I believe the spec in the documentation provided with the cube says 0.07 Watts consumed - most likely for the LEDs and the timer circuit.I have used Tripp Lite products for many years, and also sold it a long time ago when I worked for an industrial distributor. I once gave a Tripp surge protector to my dad for his PC, and one day an electrician accidentally shorted the circuit the PC was on when evaluating an old style, undocumented fuse box for replacement. A massive jolt went through the line and destroyed the surge circuit, but the PC was fine. Tripp Lite replaced the unit, even though it was not their fault. In their explanation, it did what it was supposed to do, and I've always depended on them.So, how much am I saving? I guess the only way to know for sure would be to monitor this outlet. Since I have no way of doing that, I added up all of the numbers on each charger to come up with a consumption figure. Most chargers are not working that hard once the battery is charged, but they are still on. The $70 number may be high, but hard to say. The math would be this: At $0.10 kWh, $70 annually = 700 kWh / year. 700 kWh /365/24 = .0799 kW. That means these six chargers would be drawing 0.0799 kW per hour, or about 80 watts. That seems like a lot to me. You can't really know without measuring it, because the amount of power being used at any given time varies (charging, charged, empty), and you have AC to DC conversion going on, etc. Based on this government produced table, it looks like the average draw when charged is about 8 watts for a typical tool, which would work out to about $42/year if your tools never get used (batteries perpetually charged and docked). That would still pay off in about 4 months. [...]Update - March 2017. Still working great - driving 2 power strips (using 7 outlets). Charging items: 4 x AA / AAA charger (keeps the remotes, wireless kbd, mouse, etc. happy), 2 drill / drivers, cordless stick vac, toy helicopter, string trimmer, and leaf blower / sweeper