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OK, so not a lawn product, but apropos to the season.

I love this thing. Score so far: A

Plug it in, set the selector for how long you want an item powered (1/2 hour, 3 hours, or 6 hours). Tap the tiny button to start it, and the item automatically turns off after that amount of time.

This would be great for seeding heat mats. I'm using it for my foot-warmer and Christmas tree at work so I don't accidentally leave them on. The tree isn't really an issue, the foot-warmer is easy to forget. Although safe, I'd still rather not leave it running overnight or over the weekend.

It loses the A+ down to an A for not having more timer selections. 1/2 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, and 9 hours would be perfect.

Well,since we are talking cool electronic gadgets,I will share one that I recently bought and find it fun to use for all kinds of things, most recently to measure actual amp/watt draw of the thousands of Christmas lights I have been putting up- It is called the " Kill A Watt" and is a small meter that you plug in anything you want to measure energy consumption- that old refrigerator in the garage, xmas lights,portable heaters,dehumidifier,etc- it tells you how many amps,watts,volts,etc and also allows you to program in your exact cost of electricity per killawatt hour and it computes actual running costs by hour,day,month,year....pretty neat,especially for those hard to measure appliances like dehumidifiers that cycle on/off irregularly. Here is a link Click here for more information

I've had a Kill-A-Watt for years. Great item for all homeowners. I just need to keep my wife from figuring out what she'd see if she hooked it up to the aquarium. 600 watts of heating. 400 watts of light. Pumps to lift the water from the basement filtration to the tank at 700 gallons an hour. If she ever figures it out, I'm OM...

Belkin makes something like the Kill-A-Watt that works very well; I've used it to verify the actual output of bulbs, plus check some energy vampires (which are more vampiric than one imagines sometimes). The scale is a touch finer on Belkin's than the Kill-A-Watt but reports are that the Kill-A-Watt has better features.

Yeah, adding up the lighting for plant sprouting here would render me OM as well. 160 watts per shelf of fluorescent, six shelves, equals 960 watts running seventeen hours a day equals 16.3 kWh per day. Warranted, power here is $0.09 per kWh, so it's not exactly a major expense...

By the time we're done the thing would need a dial with twenty settings on it.

I find the half hour setting useless, but it would be handy for (say) an iron or other moderately dangerous resistive device you only want to run for short periods. So I guess it has its uses for others. I tend to use the three hour setting because it's convenient at work: start at 6:30, reset around 9:30 and 12:30, and I'm going home by the time that finishes up.

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This is what I use for lights and seed/plants in the garden room. Not that make but similar.