Saving money is always in season, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

If you have some control over your office space, whether it's rented or part of your home, there are some cool tech gadgets that can improve your bottom line and even make you a better human being.

As an added bonus, most of these improvements can be done for $100 or less.

* Programmable Thermostat: This is a pretty obvious upgrade, since you really don't want to heat or cool space that's unoccupied in the middle of the night.

Tom Keenan, Business Edge
Claudio the office cat checks out The Kill A Watt electric power meter.

Of course, if you have a landlord, or control other people's offices, you'll have to chat with them. With rising energy costs, there's a pretty good chance they'll go along with a plan to save energy and money.

A related gizmo is the motion-detecting light switch, which can be had for as little as $30 and quickly saves that in wasted power. According to an estimate at Alliant Energy's website, this simple device can save you 25 to 75 per cent in energy costs for the light with which it's attached.

Needless to say, you've already gone around replacing those old lightbulbs with compact fluorescent (CF) ones.

You might as well, since incandescent bulbs will be banned across Canada by 2012, and maybe sooner in some provinces.

* Energy Meter: The business adage that "what gets measured gets managed" carries a lot of wisdom. If you had to estimate what that old beer fridge sitting in the back room is costing, you'd probably guess low.

I know, because I just put the P3 International "Kill A Watt" on an older freezer that we don't really need and found that it guzzles 270 watts just sitting there.

By my calculations, that thing is costing more than $250 a year, so it's getting unplugged as soon as the fish in it is eaten.

One company that markets these $29.95 meters, CableOrganizer, also sells more sophisticated versions such as the "Watts Up?" device. It allows you to enter the cost per kilowatt hour and even process the data on your PC.

User testimonials centre on how much power "vampire" devices like older phone chargers are sucking, even when they're not doing anything useful.

A number of people suggest putting things like VCR and DVD players on a power bar with a switch. Too lazy or forgetful to turn it off? A $40 "Smart Power Strip" from BITS Limited claims to "tame the idle-current cash drain" by sensing the flow of power and automatically ramping it down.

* Phone Message Management: Especially in a home office environment, there's nothing worse than finding that a phone message from an important client slid off the fridge when somebody opened the door.

A more organized system is just a few clicks away. Ottawa-based entrepreneur Rob Latour, a former Nortel employee, offers his CallClerk software as shareware.

This means it's free to try for 30 days. If you like it, you can keep using it by paying $34.95.

This software turns your computer into a sophisticated call management centre.

How sophisticated? It can recognize calls by caller ID and even play selected callers a special message. It can screen out pesky telemarketers and respond with a "take me off your calling list" message. Just make sure your best client doesn't get that by accident!

If an unknown call arrives, CallClerk can do an automatic reverse phone number lookup on the internet to give you a clue who it is. The thing also handles faxes and, if you use Microsoft Outlook, the caller's business card will pop up when the phone rings.

Probably the spiffiest feature is the ability to have your phone messages automatically sent to you as audio files, so you can hear them anywhere on the planet.

Major companies offer this to their employees already, and now it's available to anyone.

I love this, because seeing an e-mail with the message attached beats having to remember to check voicemail.

I won't say it necessarily makes me a better person, but if I don't return your phone call right away, I do feel more guilty.

There are a few details, including the fact that your computer needs a phone modem (not just a broadband connection), but Latour says if you don't have a suitable one, they cost $30 or less.

He reports that he makes a steady stream of income from his program, though he's not in the range of some other shareware authors who, he says, earn more than $200,000 per year.

* Total Automation Systems: Well, you could tidy this all up with a nice robotic vacuum cleaner, such as the iRobot Roomba, but experience shows that these frighten the office cat terribly.

Instead, for total gadget-mania, have a look at the panoply of devices under the "X10 Home Automation" banner.

If you need a fancy Latin name to justify such purchases to the Canada Revenue Agency, you're investing in "domotics" - domestic robotics.

Think of X10 as a remote control for your life. Dim the lights, close the curtains, put on her favorite music. Wait, this is supposed to be a business use. Adjust the security cameras, monitor the temperature in your warehouse, alert you when somebody opens the door. Signals can travel as digital data encoded over your electric wiring, or wirelessly by radio, or the thing can simply make phone calls.

People who have tried X10 sometimes report strange problems, such as the system cutting out when heavy appliances such as clothes dryers are turned on. So it may not be the best choice for heavy industrial applications.

But, hey, if it's just you, a few other employees and the cat, there's no reason X10 can't detect when the pet door opens and pull back the lid on the food dish.

That way, you and CallClerk can keep the phone tag going, while the Kill a Watt and that home thermostat attempt to keep everyone healthy, wealthy, and wise.

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)