Standby is the self-sufficientist’s enemy. If you ever want to start generating your own electricity, you can’t afford to waste it on illuminating a standby light. That’s why we’re fans of Bye Bye Standby, the little remote control set that lets you switch off your gadgets once and for all without scrabbling around for the socket.

Now we’ve added the OneClick Intelliplug to our set-up, banishing standby in our office, as well as the lounge. It’s entirely passive, you see, so you don’t even need to think about turning off your peripherals any more.

The plug - a grey box that plugs into a regular wall socket - has three ports for plugs. You plug in your primary device into the one on the top, and your peripherals in the other two sockets.

Your device in the master socket then becomes the key to controlling all of your other add-ons.

We tested it using a Mac (it’s just as happy with a PC) and attached an external storage device, plugging the powered drive into one of the peripheral sockets and the Mac into the one on top. We could just as easily have plugged in two full extension cables of devices and they would all have been controlled by the Mac.

We switched on the Mac, and the drive duly powered up five seconds later. It was ready for use by the time the Mac had finished booting. Switching off the Mac did the same in reverse, safely powering down the drive five seconds after the Mac had switched off and the drive unmounted.

OneClick claims that this device, which costs just shy of £20 RRP (£7.64 on Amazon), can reduce your power consumption by as much as 35W an hour, and pay for itself inside of a year. It ships with a warranty that covers that period, but the makers claim it should keep on running for 15 years or more.

Is it a worthwhile addition? Absolutely. The 35W hourly saving is ambitious, and it relies on you having a lot of standby-hungry devices plugged in at once, but this remains the only way you can switch off everything on your desk with a click of the mouse. Combine it with Bye Bye Sandby and you’ll never see a standby light again.

Price £19.99
Pros A simple way to control all of your devices with a single button or mouse. Can deliver real cost savings. Available for much less than the RRP if you shop around.
Cons None

Roberts’ new solar radio overcomes a problem that afflicts many competitors: sudden silence as a cloud passes by. That’s because it incorporates a battery that is constantly topped up by the broad solar cell on the top of the case. Leave it in a sunny spot on your kitchen windowsill and it will forever be ready for action.

It’s the easy way to self-sufficient power, allowing you to do away with the bundled power adaptor and rely on the sun wholesale. Knowing that our natural tendency with a solar product would be to use it outside, Roberts has blessed the solarDAB with a suitably rugged case. The sturdy plastic body is shiny and easily wiped clean, while the ends and corners are encased in a layer of grey rubber that should protect it from small bumps.

The controls are minimal and easily understood, but it’s lacking one important feature: FM reception. Discounting the line-in socket, this is a digital-only radio which, with the technology still not fully mature, is a problem. While we could pick up strong digital signals from the national BBC and independent stations in our test area, we couldn’t find any local broadcasters - BBC or commercial - despite rival digital products having no such problem. If its DAB features had been supplemented by regular FM we would then have switched to the older, trusted technology, but as they weren’t, we couldn’t.

It is unlikely this is down to the solar power source, but it does nonetheless dent the appeal of this device - particularly if you plan on using it as the only portable radio in your home.

Be sure to check for strong digital coverage where you live by entering your postcode at ukdigitalradio.com before deciding whether or not this is the right radio for you. If it is, great news: it’s a joy to use, and we love the panel’s battery backup.

Price around £70
Pros Solar panel keeps internal battery charged. No loss of signal as clouds block out the sun.
Cons No FM backup. Unable to pick up local stations in our test area.
Verdict The best solar radio we have yet come across, but not quite perfect.

What a lovely idea: quit London and move down to Ilminster to run a small holding. It’s the subject of this book - also published under the title Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes - by former Express editor, Rosie Boycott.

Better-known for appearances on Woman’s Hour and Late Review, she took to the countryside - at the weekends at least - after being involved in a crippling car crash she was lucky to survive. Once there, she and her city lawyer husband rented enough space to raise chickens for eggs, pigs for meat and vegetables to sell to local businesses, and bagged themselves a stall at the local farmers’ market, where the sold herbs. Quickly becoming a fully-fledged member of the local community, she finds herself campaigning against a new one-way system and the construction of a Tesco store that threatens the viability of the town’s small local shops.

And that’s the trouble. This isn’t a book about running a small farm; it’s more an idyllic stroll through the author’s life, present and past. That would be fine if it were called ‘My Weekends in the Country’ - Peter Mayle pulled it off with A Year in Provence, after all - but it’s not. The title leads us to believe it’s the story of her farm, but it’s just as much about her thoughts on the afterlife, her past relationships and her children. It’s a pseudo biography where life on the farm often takes a back seat as she wanders off for pages at a time. It’s gentle and inoffensive, but it lacks structure and feels poorly-planned.

When the farm does come to the fore, it is a fascinating and bleakly honest look at the trials of setting up a small holding, and an expose of the small profits it delivers. For months she and her partner plough a small fortune into their crops and livestock with seemingly no end result, to the point where an eventual profit of just a few hundred pounds feels like a singular triumph.

If you’re looking to start up your own small holding, this is a refreshing reality check, and nobody who has ready it can undertake such an endeavour with anything but open eyes and a fully-informed mind. If you want a lighter, more easily digestible treatise on the evils of big supermarkets without reading Andrew Simm’s excellent, shocking Tescopoly, or a semi-biography of a one-time newspaper editor who has fallen into the Good Life, then this quickly-read volume could be right up your street.

Price £15.99
ISBN 074758897X
Author Rosie Boycott

Not two months after I switched energy provider, my new supplier announced a price hike. A pretty big one, as it happens. What’s most galling about that is that one of the reasons I chose them in the first place was that they’d just gone through one increase already, which I assumed would mean any further change in their rates would be a good year off at least.

I’m on a green tariff where all of my bills go towards providing hydroelectric power, and the plan came bundled with an energy monitor that tracks every watt as it’s used. Having it beside the TV blinking away every time you boil the kettle or wash your clothes certainly helps you focus on your usage, which is where Bye Bye Standby comes in. It’s three plug adaptors and a remote control that lets you switch your appliances on and off from the comfort of an armchair.

It sounds like the height of laziness, but actually it makes good sense. If you want to actually switch off my TV you have to either unclip all of its back panels to get to its master power switch, or clamber around behind some furniture, the upshot being that you’re more likely to use standby and waste power every time you head out or up to bed.

Now I can switch it off at the plug - along with the digibox, DVD and everything else plugged into the same extension - with the press of a single button, because that extension lead is plugged into the Bye Bye Standby adaptor. At the same time I can switch off the lights by pressing red button two (or switch them on with green button two, which impresses visitors) and switch the broadband router on and off from downstairs (it’s upstairs in the study) with buttons red three and green three.

Each unit has the capacity to control up to eight plugs without changing the channel by switching between groups one and two on the front of the control, and new plugs can be bought individually or in packs to expand your set-up. Each has a simple 1-2 toggle on the side that assigns it to one group or the other.

Now, as I head to bed at night or leave the house in the morning I just press each red button in turn and know for definite that everything is switched off. The packaging promised annual savings of more than double the asking price, which may be a little optimistic in my case as I’ve always been quite good about switching things off properly, but now that it’s become a part of my life, and control of all of my sockets has been centralised in a slimline control small enough to lose down to the back of a cushion, I wouldn’t want to go back to the old way of working.

Price £20 - £25 for three-plug kit including remote (£17.28 from Amazon).
Pros Centralises the controls of every gadget in your home. Quicker than turning off everything in turn.
Cons None.
Verdict The smartest, easiest way to save energy - and money - in the home.

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There are many reasons to become self-sufficient. For some it’s the simple enjoyment of standing on your own two feet, while for others it’s a desire not to be beholden to the whims and manipulation of the big-chain supermarkets.

That second group would get a whole lot larger if everyone was forced to read Andrew Simms’ extraordinary Tescopoly. Bursting with stats and facts it documents the big four supermarket groups’ (and Tesco in general’s) exploitation of the market for groceries, and the harm they do to their customers, suppliers and the environment by strangling competition and forcing food producers into impossible deals.

More worryingly, though, it documents Tesco’s drive into ever more areas, wiping out whole high streets by providing everything from cabbages to cutlets, baps to bank accounts, and ready meals to medicine. Now, as it moves into providing phone services, broadband and even legal services, its power over our day to day lives gets ever stronger, and we only feed its ability to exercise this control by giving it more and more information about who we are, what we like and what we do.

There is so much in this book that is incredible, extraordinary and frightening that picking out just one quote is close to impossible, but Simms’ analysis of the supermarkets’ ability to gather such minute information on ourselves sticks in the mine, and should be enough to have us cutting up our Clubcards in droves.

With the power of Clubcard to analyse the lives of Tesco customers, this creates some fascinating opportunities for cross-selling. Remember, 60,000 different customised promotions go out with Clubcard mailings. Should the computer notice that Mr Smith is buying a lot of condoms when Mrs Smith seems to be away (indicated by a break in her regular shopping patterns), and Mr Smith appears to be buying flowers and lingere when it isn’t Mrs Smith’s birthday, it’s perfectly imaginable that Mr Smith’s next Clubcard mailing might include a money-off voucher for the Tesco Divorce Pack. This would, after all, be simple, customer driver marketing logic. From Baby Club to getting divorced to making your Last Will and Testament, Tesco will be there to take a slice of all of life’s (and death’s) key moments.

Is this feasible? Certainly.

There are around 25 million [Clubcards] in existence, representing 14 million households. Perhaps 10 million cards are in active use. This creates an extraordinary eventuality. Shortly before its fall, the German Democratic Republic - East Germany, one of the most famous police states in the world - only had a population of around 16 million. That means Tesco almost certainly holds more files on British citizens than the East German state ever held on its own people.

But of course the German Democratic Republic was very different to the UK, and it neither built up its records with overt help from the supermarkets, nor shared with them what it knew about their customers. In the UK, however, that may yet happen.

A darker twist to such surveillance technology emerged when the UK government let it be known that it planned to link proposed compulsory biometric identity cards, designed to help control immigration, to the data contained on supermakrt loyalty cards. The idea floated was to allow two-way data traffic between the government and major corporations like banks and supermarkets. Information contained on the national identity database, set up to underpin the ID card scheme, would be made available to companies for a price. In the other direction, the police could be alerted the moment someone who was the target of an inquiry made use of a loyalty card or cash machine.

You could discount a lot of what is said in this book as paranoia had Simms, who is policy director for the New Economics Foundation and coined the term Clone Towns, not backed up his facts with an impressive array of references and stats that add weight to his argument.

I’d have liked to have seen some direct response from Tesco, rather than mere reported quotes, and there is no indication whether or not the company was directly asked to contribute to the work, but this remains an important and compelling read, and one that will make you think twice, and perhaps three times before shopping at the famous red and blue store.

Self-sufficiency, then, could be about more than the simple satisfaction of eating your own produce throughout the year. It could be about preserving your own privacy, fighting for the rights of small producers and helping to save the environment.

There’s loads more about Tescopoly, and local campaigns about and against the store’s further expansion, at tescopoly.org.

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