An aesthetic benefit to placing the ThinkPad bricks strategically around the home is that you can mount them in a way that's more tidy when you're using it, than dragging a brick around. (Though there can be an aesthetic downside to having a cable around when you're not using it.)

My favorite means of mounting a brick is to use a large pair of Velcro. For undersides on some IKEA tables, I once had to augment the Velcro pad adhesive with Gorilla Glue. Sometimes I use zip ties instead of Velcro.

When buying extra bricks, in addition to the presumed-good one that came with the laptop, I advise going to some effort and guesswork to try to get genuine, non-counterfeit ones. I've seen some corner-cutting in circuitry in other power adapters and chargers, and that seems like a fire hazard.

For people who don't like the idea of bricks plugged into the AC when not in use, Leviton and others make little switches that plug into the AC outlet.

I do this same thing, except now with USB-C chargers it's even better. Charge my laptop or my phone. There's some great charger bricks that go on sale for ~$10, so I have a lot of those.

Historically USB chargers have consumed power when connected to the wall socket, even when not connected to a phone. Some phones have even displayed an alert "Disconnect power supply from wall to save energy" when you unplugged the USB cable from the phone. Do modern USB-C chargers suffer from the same drawback and so shouldn’t be left plugged in all the time?

I'll have to plug in a power meter to check, but I'd assume the ghost power draw is negligible.

It ends beings negligible, when you start to have 10 devices sipping 0.5-1W each.

Doing some quick math in my head, even at 1w draw each, if they're constantly drawing that 24/7, it would end up costing about 80 cents per month (at $0.11/kWh). The cost of purchasing the chargers easily outweighs that. But I probably only have 5 around the house, so I have no problem spending 40 cents per month.

You can also convert usb-c charger into specific laptop chargers with the appropriate barrel/rectangle adapter (search for usb-c pd trigger + laptop model on aliexpress). Caveat: the laptop doesnt know the max wattage of the charger, it's your job to make sure it gets 60W or 90W from the USB PD adapter

> There's some great charger bricks that go on sale for ~$10, so I have a lot of those.

Is it against HN norms to put a specific recommendation here? I'd love to know some reliable chargers in that range.

60w charger: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B08786SHXV/

90w charger: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B083ZBXXN5/

Thanks! I'm glad to see the recommendation for Nekteck; they looked kind of generic knock-off-y to me, but I went for https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0712252ZQ a while ago, and have been very happy with it as essentially my sole charger.

No problem. Nekteck always gets good reviews from The Wirecutter, and they did some decent testing on the chargers: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-usb-c-macboo...

Yep, bought a bunch on ebay for ~ $7 each and keep them around the house.