Is this the key to slashing hotel energy consumption?

3 by Becky Striepe on May 30, 2012

Hotels waste a ton of electricity on empty rooms. Just think about it, right? Every empty room in every hotel is running air conditioning or heat and probably has at least a TV in standby mode, if not a cable box, alarm clock, and other small appliances. Hotels waste from 30 to 50 percent of their electricity just on empty rooms either between stays or while guests are out and about for the day. But what if there were an easy way to completely cut the power to a room when it was empty?

My little sister is visiting Brazil right now with her boyfriend, and she emailed to tell me about a very cool feature in her hotel room: the room key controls all of the electricity to your room! Here's what she had to say:

You put the card in when you walk in, and the A/C comes on and the lights work. On the way out you grab the card and everything shuts off. There's a 30 second delay to make sure you're not in the dark.

So long, energy vampires! And the added benefit? No more wondering where you put that darn keycard when you came in last night!

She didn't have any more info on who makes this device, so if anyone knows, I'd love to hear! In the photo she sent, you can read the word Bloctec printed on the box, but googling didn't turn anything up. Have any of you seen this device? I'd love to learn more about it!

mikelite

Don’t mean to be that internet troll that craps on your excitement, but we’ve seen these in every hotel we’ve stayed at in Europe and the Caribbean over the last few years. The only downside is, they all use a common credit card shape, so you can easily slide another card in there to keep the room cool while you’re away. It would be much more effective if you needed something uniquely shaped to activate the juice. Like a pinata! No one carries around a spare pinata!

http://glueandglitter.com Becky Striepe

Oh cool! So I guess it’s just the U.S. that’s behind the times here. Not very surprising, unfortunately.

I would love to see an energy-saving pinata. Please invent that and then contact me immediately with photos.

Tomclarke1

Been living/traveling in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia. for the past 6 months haven’t been in a hotel room that didn’t have one installed. However, most of the one’s i’ve seen require the card key and can’t be bypassed. I tried, needed to download some files to the laptop while I was out without killing my battery.
You might see something like this in a smaller mom pop eco-operation and it would be OK. But the American public would howl with outrage if they had to come back to a hot room.
I personally like the idea, but I think it should just apply to AC and lighting leaving an outlet live for recharging electronics would be nice.