Taking your keys? Turn off your house.

I just caught a marvelous new concept that was built as part of the Future Routers project sponsored by TalkTalk. The router knows when you're in the house, and when you're not, it turns itself off. But it doesn't use fancy IR detectors or RFID chips, instead, it holds your keys.

The router has space for four sets of keys, when the last set of keys gets lifted off the wall-hung router, it turns itself off.

Of course, there are some problems with this. Like, what if your roommate is downloading an important file for work (or play) that he'll be needing later that day? Does he hang something else on the router to keep it alive? And how long does this last before there's just something permanently hung on the router?

It does, however solve more than one problem at once. If you want to make sure your Internet connection stays on, you've got to put your keys on the thing, so the chances of you losing your keys goes down. I know that's a big selling point for me, especially since my wife and I share a set, so neither of us ever know where they are or who to blame for losing them (me, generally.)

But this points out another problem. Households that don't have keys for every member of the family would have to think up other solutions.

Of course, this kind of passive / active energy management could work far beyond just routers. We've seen "whole house switches" in the past, that basically eliminate all nonessential (not the refrigerator) power use when you leave the house. What if that was simply triggered when you took the last key ring off the last hook? Sounds like a good idea to me.