One of the items mentioned in the NRA Refuse to be a Victim class is a simple electrical timer to turn lamps or TVs on/off at various times in order to make it look like someone is home. Such timers are also good for other purposes, like saving money by running a water heater only during the times you usually need it. In my case, I got one to save money on running a recirculation pump on my hot water supply (in addition to the ones we have for controlling lamps, and in the winter, our Christmas tree lights).
At the low end, you can get a mechanical electrical timer for about $10. Amazon sells one (The Intermatic TN711C 24-hour timer) which is adequate for controlling a few lamps, and features a “randomizer” that causes the on and off times to vary by a few minutes either way to avoid the “timer-controlled” predictability. You can probably find a mechanical timer even cheaper without the randomizer, but the randomizer is a good feature to have, and my experience with the cheaper timers is that they don’t keep time reliably. When I used one with my recirculation pump, I found that after a week, the time was off by enough the the pump wasn’t running when I needed it.
Also, if you have a power failure, the timer just stops while the power is off, and the time will be off by the length of the power outage when it comes back on. That might not matter much if your primary usage is to run lamps on “vacation mode”, but if you are using it for saving money by turning off appliances when unneeded, it’s a bother.
A better solution in that case is a digital timer. While the mechanical timer is a bit simpler to set up, it is much less versatile. A digital timer, depending on the features, will run two or three times the price of a mechanical one. My wife purchased a GE 15079 Digital Timer, which features up to 20 different on-off times over a 7-day period, so you can set up different times for weekends and weekdays, etc. For security purposes, it has a simple push-button random setting. One of the nicer features of this timer is a built-in battery backup, so power failures don’t cause the timer to lose the time of day. That also means that you can un-plug the unit and move it to another location without having to completely reprogram it, making it a portable timer.
We did find one drawback to this unit, namely, the instructions were written in teensy-tiny print on a small slip of paper, which can be a problem for folks in the trifocal generation. My wife took the instruction sheet and scanned it into her computer so she could enlarge it enough to read easily. Overall, though, we have been very pleased with this unit, especially after discovering that it has several useful features that weren’t even mentioned on the outside of the retail packaging, such as the count-down feature.
