If you are like are us, you have too many mobile electronics (PDA’s, phones, MP3 players, etc.,) and charging stations all of over your house–especially if you have teenagers!  Earlier this week, Norm ordered a few AC/USB wall outlets for our house.  The first one, was from a company called Newer Technology.  We really liked this one because the USB ports have “Safety Shutters” which automatically shuts off the power to the USB ports when a connecting cable is removed.  We’re all for energy efficiency! 

It is suppose to install into a “standard wall outlet box”, according to the package.  Norm is a licensed electrician, so no problem here.  But hold on…

Check out the size of the Newer Technology outlet (the white one on the left), compared to a standard GFCI outlet on the right.  Hmmm…that’s going to be a stretch to get that into our existing standard outlet box, but we gave it a shot.

We placed it in the outlet box before we wired it just to see if it would fit.  It would, but just barely.  So, Norm proceeded to wire it in.

Once it was all wired up, it would not fit at all.  I was so disappointed, because I love this idea!  It would probably work if you had a double outlet box. (And, this particular box had two cables running to it, so that played a factor, as well).  But for where we wanted to put this, it would not work. 

Which brings me to the next product Norm ordered:  It is a surge protector from APC which has four outlets and two USB charging ports.  

It plugs directly into a standard 3-prong receptacle–so no hard wiring needed!  How easy is that?  I like this, but wish it had the energy-saving mode that the Newer Technology outlet did.

It was easy enough to install and provides us with more outlets, which you can never have too many of, right?

In case you are wondering, both items were ordered from Amazon.com.  We were not paid for our review.  I just thought I would share another episode of our weekend in home improvement!