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DAM Pops Energy Star's Bubble
Martin Hellman writes "Last month we discussed a major problem with the EPA's Energy Star program. A Sony TV that was advertised to draw less than 0.1 watts in standby mode was actually drawing 15 watts — 150 times the stated value. A lack of information in the user manual and a poor response from Sony led me to suspect the problem was with the Electronic Program Guide feature, but a lack of information in the User Guide and a lack of response from Sony made it impossible to be sure — or to turn off the EPG. At current prices, that power consumption cost me about as much as a subscription to TV Guide magazine! The EPG was not as free as the on screen instructions would have you believe. Now, Device Guru reports on the resolution of that issue. As suspected, the problem was with the EPG, and there is a way to turn it off — now documented in that story. The problem is probably not unique to Sony or TVs that claim Energy Star compliance (devices are self-certified by the manufacturers!), so picking up a power meter is likely to have a good return on investment. As a result of this waste of power, the EPA is planning for future versions of the Energy Star requirements to limit the amount of time a TV can spend in Download Acquisition Mode (DAM) as the time for acquiring the EPG is known."
It's a little like hiring the A-team to eradicate your rat infestation. You're paying a premium to save money in the long run, but the long run simply isn't long enough to justify the short-term expense.
Do you work in the credit industry?
Can't there be a way to filter out comments that have "N**GER" in it say more than two times?
They could require devices to generate energy while on standby (by vapourizing invisible pink unicorns), and manufacturers could keep self-certifying their devices as compliant.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My Freezer has an energy star rating also, but I see that it too, downloads TV listings and so is exempt. Same with my toaster. It is supposed to draw 0 Watts when not toasting, but because it's downloading TV listings, it draws 1500 watts continuously and glows like a red pepper. I also have a blender, Energy star rated, but because it downloads TV listings it too draws 1500 watts and glows red hot also... make is kinda hard to chop up ice cubes!
What do whe have:
1) Rootkits by Sony BMG.
2) Non existent customer service and end of live / support in less the 6 month by Sony Ericsson.
4) Insistence on prohibitory memory stick by all Sony departments.
5) Lying on Energy Star Rating by Sony Electronics.
Well Sony is on my the list of evil corporation for quite a while now and it does not look they are getting of the list any soon.
Martin
Picking up a power meter is likely to have a good return on investment.
Remember to pick only Energy Star-compliant power meters, though!
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
This is why I have all of my electronics go through a wall switch. TVs, amps, cable boxes, game systems, etc... all continue to draw power even when off. Flip the wall switch on your way out and you have a low-tech way to fight this problem.
The only downside is that the digital cable box takes a few minutes to start. Actually, come to think of it, it's more of an upside since I get tired of waiting and go do something more productive instead of watching TV.
I really do not know that much about consumer electronics(tv, stereo) anymore. When we went to several different stores, I was surprised that all of them said that Sony no longer has the customer service and their equipment tends to fail quickly. Picked up a Samsung instead.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can get a subscription to TV Guide for eleven dollars ans a quarter?
are you sure that' snot an introductory rate?
that's at my local average of 8.55 cents per kilowatt hour.
pending committee review
DVD-player, TV, cable-box and Wii are on the same energy block, one master-plug in the wall-socket enables/disables all of it. It's unplugged 8 hours per day, and several hours per day: I guess it's the best/cheapest solution .
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Well, only if you can use it to test new appliance BEFORE you buy them. Otherwise, you're going to be spending a lot of time buying things and returning them.
Frankly, my time is worth enough that spending more than three or four hours shopping for a new TV (or any other appliance) is a bad idea. Which means that buying something, then wasting time analyzing the power usage, returning it, buying another one, repeat endlessly is a complete waste of time and money.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
They could require devices to generate energy while on standby (by vapourizing invisible pink unicorns), and manufacturers could keep self-certifying their devices as compliant.
That, or use magic pixie dust.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
was actually drawing 15 watts... At current prices, that power consumption cost me about as much as a subscription to TV Guide magazine!
A constant draw of 15 watts is (15/1000)*24*30 = 10.8 Kwh/month. Even at the most expensive prices in the US (20 cents per Kwh), this is roughly two dollars a month.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
I assume it's only drawing 15 watts while downloading program info. If that takes a whole minute per day, the average power draw is about 0.01 watts, ten times better than the claim. Even if downloads took 10 minutes per day, that only brings it up to the 0.1 watt level.
Cable / sat DVR and boxes should go in to a low power mode. When not needed You can spin down the HDD when it is not needed and how about put the cpu in a sleep mode / CPU throttling.
Invisible unicorns? Sure. Pink unicorns? No problem. But invisible pink unicorns? Now you're just making stuff up -- everyone knows that invisible doesn't have a colour.
As an aside, what colour is a mirror?
F
You don't have the faith, do you ?
This
We had an article recently on "Green Plug", the USB power scheme. that's something else that went wrong. They made it way too complicated, requiring software handshaking between the power source and device.
Instead of GreenPlug, all that's needed is a low-power mode for USB power:
That's all that's needed. Just some micropower electronics. No special "GreenPlug protocol", no software handshaking. USB power sources don't even need the data pins (good for security). But, of course, the GreenPlug people wouldn't have any "proprietary technology" to sell.
Seriously, guys. Even Craigslist has a flagging mechanism.
Couldn't have it as part of moderation? I know I've been market as troll for stuff that I honestly have not intended as troll of flamebait, but the parent post is different. It is racist, hateful, and offensive.
This isn't merely contrarian or unpopular speech, it is vulgar and hateful and has no social importance. It is profane and disgusting.
I had exactly the same experience with my Panasonic TV. I put a power meter on it shortly after I bought it and discovered that it was drawing 20 watts when off instead of the promised 0.1 watts. I figured that the problem might be the EPG, and discovered with experimentation that the undocumented method of putting in a Zip code of 000000 disabled it and solved the problem.
Even at the most expensive prices in the US (20 cents per Kwh), this is roughly two dollars a month.
It may be $0.18 ~ $0.20 for the electrical charge, but on my bill there is delivery and fuel charge. My electricity, in total, comes to a bit over $0.25 a kWh.
"
I recently used a "Watts Up" and went through my whole house. Wall warts (transformers) are nasty. Some just sit and use 10~15 watts doing nothing. So if you leave it plugged in and turn the device off, it still sucks up power.
All "switchers" are not created equal either. Some laptop and monitor sitching power supplies may draw 60w when on, but draw 10w when
"off"
I went through my house and brought my electric bill down from $220 to about $180 a month.
Instead of just making more rules which companies usually break anyway it would be wiser to establish a carrot and stick approach. Reward companies for turning in cheaters by giving them large sums of cash. Reward companies that produce energy saving products by giving them large sums. Fine the hell out of violating companies to get the money to give to the good companies. And please be heavy handed!
I've always known my 2 year old 42" LG TV uses a lot of energy for the TV Guide On Screen feature since the processor is never off. Reading this story made me find the box to see if it claimed an Energy Star rating, and to my surprise, LG was honest and there is none.
This model comes with a built-in DVR and its disk drive never spins down, you can always hear the hum when it is quiet. But, I figure it is no more wasteful than the DVR in my previous set top boxes.
Nice thing about it being always on is that I have my computer turn the TV on and off with its wake up, shutdown, and sleep modes using the serial port control. Can't have everything.
Also, it must be at least seven words away from the word "guy".
Really no text required as this is such a no brainer that I find it hard to believe even in this time of technological ignorance in the midst of plenty. Go to the store and buy one of those plug-in strips that have a switch on it. You do not have to fill in all the other spots, but you likely have the same problem with VCRs incorporating tuners, disc players incorporating tuners whether the previous devices admit to their presence or not; so you can use the remaining spots if necessary to plug them in as well. Then when you are not using the equipment, simply turn it off! Its your equipment and your power subscription!
An OFF switch
I mean a real, cuts off the AC current off switch. TV's used to have them 20 -30 years ago.
Power used while switched off = 0 watts.
It would be great if in the future such articles were written in "plain English" rather than in "technicalese", thank you.
It turns out I had the same issue with my Sony KDL-46WL140 and the fix worked there too. In my case, not only was the TV drawing 16W all the time, but the EPG did not even work in my area. Thanks Slashdot!
It's a little like hiring the A-team to eradicate your rat infestation. You're paying a premium to save money in the long run, but the long run simply isn't long enough to justify the short-term expense.
You're shelling out cash for a product which claims a certain set of features. If the feature set is not as advertised, and the manufacturer knows it, it is fraud. It's no different than if Sony claimed to do 1080p, but only did 720i. If I'm giving you cash, I want to know what I'm getting.
If Sony (or whomever) doesn't think the energy saving features were important enough to implement properly, they shouldn't have wasted resources to do a half-assed job in the first place, and they shouldn't have bothered to advertise said (supposed) functionality.
Sony products are generally of good quality, and this is just ruining that good reputation.
it is axiomatic that an invisible pink unicorn viewed in a mirror is mirror-colored.
I have a bad habit if measuring claims made by manufactures and it appears that lots of them must have access to those invisible pink unicorns since their claims are way off. I find that CFLs are the worst offenders and often to take up to about 55% more power than they claim and while I can't measure a lumen from a non-consistent point source (I'm not even sure how it should be done), I can measure average light output in LUX after a bulb is 1000 hours old and I have yet to be impressed with the honesty on the product boxes.
I have found that larger companies with a strong European market are doing much better with their standby power. My imac and Nokia chargers take so little power when the device is fully charged that is less than the error range of the instruments I use.
The specifications page at the end of the manual clearly states:
* While the TV is collecting TV Guide data and/or during software update the power consumption is less than 30W.
I remember when we got our first TV that had "instant on". My dad, en electrical engineer, always hammered on us kids to turn the power off at the wall when we weren't watching. This was in Australia where we had a real honest-to-goodness power switch on every wall plug. I was boggled to discover a few years later that US power points were live all the time.
Silver.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I just purchased a Westinghouse television and it is documented, rather well, how to set the television to use less than 1 watt of power in standby. It includes a warning that this is not set as factory default because it takes up to 10 seconds for the television to turn on when in the low-watt standby mode - far too long for most people to wait.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
That's hilarious. You ask for a filter on the string "N**GGER", but the comment to which you replied doesn't contain that string even once!
Locally, RoadRunner stopped supplying the data back around Thanksgiving 2008.
Turning off a service the device cannot use seems like a good idea.
There's no OFF on my Toshiba DVR, however.
Really? I'm looking at a mirror now and I see blue, flesh colour, brown, and hazel. No silver. How can you tell it's silver if you can't see the colour?
As an aside, what colour is a mirror?
A mirror reflects all colors with high and equal proportions therefore it must be white by definition.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I bought a power meter recently and the results astouned me.
My desktop PC uses almost 20 watts of power when turned OFF.
Asus EPU does absolutely nothing (My system runs at around 160watts at idle regardless of whether the EPU is set to performance or efficiency).
A gtx260 consumes 30 watts more at idle than an 8600gts, despite the gtx260 having a much lower idle power rating.
I plan on testing everything in my house to find out where power is being wasted.
I used to use the word nigger a lot. We had some niggers next door who would do stuff like steal the neighborhood's bikes, occasionally harbor a garage full of strange cars or ATVs, do burnouts in the street, congregate in my back yard, fight dogs in their own, and generally behave in a loud fashion whenever the temperature rose above 75 degrees. Those jobless niggers had a swat team kick their back door in twice in the past year.
Except, generally, the niggers next door where fair skinned with blond hair. There was an occasional black person over there, and the color was never a problem -- the problem was the behavior. Nigger described this better than any other word I could conjure.
I explained this once to a good friend of mine that I've known my entire life, who happens to be a black man who is both better educated than I and who has been around the block a few more times. He told me that, though he appreciated the fact that my use of nigger was not racially descriptive, that it was still an ugly word. I explained to him a bit more about the situation with the niggers next door, and he agreed with me that their behavior is not something that should be socially-acceptable in what is otherwise a very decent neighborhood.
He told me that the a more descriptive and less hurtful term might be that they were doing some gangsta shit, or perhaps that they were up to some nigga shit, but that using nigger, no matter how good my intentions were, was probably the wrong thing to do.
I've been using those terms since, except right now to illustrate a point.
Is my use of the word "nigger" in this post, as a description and pontification of how I learned to better use English, a troll which should be automatically modded down? It's offtopic in an energy discussion, for sure, but I'm not trolling. I'm just relaying a snippet of my life for those who will read it.
For this reason, we need human moderators, not automated an censor.
Kid-proof tablet..
Because mirrors are made by applying a thin coat of silver to glass. The result is highly reflective but still imparts some of its own color onto the reflected light.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Or: is the TV there system "tivoization"? If so then your head does not need to exoplode. Tivoization is an evil explotation of an loophole in GPL2 licence.
Remember: Exploting loopholes in good things is normal behavior for evil corporations.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/7657/
I have one of these. Note that you can get them cheaper than what ThinkGeek sells them for, but they have a nice web page.
As an example, I metered some new 1U servers that I which indicates a range of 0.8 - 1.5A depending on system load. This is important, since we are at 14A of a 20A circuit in our data center. We are going to have to upgrade here soon.
Most of the ones I've looked at lately have been arse-coloured. Don't judge me, I'm just using the mirror the way it was intended.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Don't hate just Sony, HP LP3065 (30" LCD) draws 15W completely turned off (60x more than stated) and 16-132W in sleep (66x more than stated). Funny thing is HP claims it's Energy Star, but "actual values may be lower or higher".
In communist Germany, first they came for the naggers,
And I didn't speak up because I did not nag.
Then they came for the nudgers,
And I didn't speak up because I did not nudge.
Then they came for the teen-agers, and gerbils.
Then they came for me, but by that time there were
NO GERmans left to speak up.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Just plug the television into a cheap old power bar (you know, the kind you probably have three of sitting around because you used to have your computer plugged into them but you don't trust their surge protectors any more because they're several years old), and switch the power bar off when you aren't using the TV. Then it'll draw zero watts.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Yes it is still offensive. *nothing* you described deviates from calling someone a 'redneck' either.
Calling them low income, uneducated, drug dealing morons still conveys everything you want to convey..unless you wanted to convey they were *black*, in which case you refute your own argument.
I will say installing a filter for known uses, such as more than one of the phrases "Installing your N*****", "Housing your N*****" etc, seems a reasonable thing to do, since most of these posts are pretty much canned.
But if such a filter were installed just for N***** and it caused me to miss your ever so informative piece of garbage...sign me up now...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Hindsight is 20/20.
And you could have said the exact same thing without using the N-word at all. I don't agree with your point about calling the people next door n****rs, and would feel that you were being a troll, if you decided to use another ethnicity into a synonym for "criminal".
I personally don't care if the GPs suggestion is put in place or not (and doubt if it ever will). The policy GP proposed was that the frequency of the word be limited to two more than what you would expect to hear in any reasonable conversation.
My objection was that the GP was modded "troll" for making a suggestion that people disagree with. That is censorship as well, but of a different kind. GP was suggesting that we censor words, and modders were censoring ideas. I would rather the idea be brought up and shot down, than modded down.
I think it is also very telling that my post was modded "troll" twice, because of the horribly offensive things I said (I have no complaints about those who modded it off-topic).
I assume the exclamation point indicates that the author thinks that this is not only a problem, but that it's exceedingly obvious that it's a problem?
Why?
Is there evidence that manufacturers are cheating? (no) They problem is that the loophole in the requirements. So if the manufacturers aren't cheating, why not continue to stick them with the bill for compliance testing?
Sure. But the most amazing thing about this post was that it proves cousin humping inbred Jed can indeed spell.
*sigh*
You didn't read my post. The folks next door were white. My description of them as being niggers was, therefore, not racial.
Words are good. All of them. Some of them are more powerful than others, and some of them are more hurtful than others. But all words (all of them) are good.
We have truly reached a new low in society if wherein it is suggested that one cannot discuss a word if such a discussion involves use of that word. If you, sir, see my discussion of the word "nigger," in pontification of how I learned how not to use the word "nigger," then you sir are as blind and stupid as the bigotry which you seem to attempt to renounce.
So blind, in fact, that you cannot see that I am trying to prevent further abuses of the term. Where are we, kindergarten? Should I really write "n*****" instead of "nigger" on such a liberal forum as Slashdot?
Were you in Salem in 1692, I expect that you'd have been one of the ones in the streets with a torch or a pitchfork.
Kid-proof tablet..
*sigh*
You didn't read my post. The folks next door were white. My description of them as being niggers was, therefore, not racial.
I read you post and got that. But calling someone a "white nigger" is still an insult to black people, even if the person you meant to insult is actually white. The fact that you went from saying "stop acting like a nigger" to "stop acting like a nigga" does not change anything.
We have truly reached a new low in society if wherein it is suggested that one cannot discuss a word if such a discussion involves use of that word.
Correction: If it involves repeated use of the word.
If you, sir, see my discussion of the word "nigger," in pontification of how I learned how not to use the word "nigger," then you sir are as blind and stupid as the bigotry which you seem to attempt to renounce.
I can only assume that the purpose of gratuitous use of the word in a way that accomplished nothing, was intended to provoke people. And now you're playing the innocent victim because somebody called you out on it.
So blind, in fact, that you cannot see that I am trying to prevent further abuses of the term.
No, you aren't trying to prevent further abuse. you're trying to rewrite the dictionary so that people don't mind being called niggers. Unfortunately, that word is tied in with another time in America. Trying to divorce a racial epithet from its connotations is pointless. You can't put a happy face on an atrocity and expect the people affected by it to just smile and move on.
Were you in Salem in 1692, I expect that you'd have been one of the ones in the streets with a torch or a pitchfork.
No, I'd probably be running from those people. I assume that you'd be the guy running down the street yelling "n****r" at the top of his lungs.
No, I'd probably be running from those people. I assume that you'd be the guy running down the street yelling "n****r" at the top of his lungs.
And that's where we'll have to agree to disagree. You're afraid of words. I understand; myself, I'm afraid of spiders.
I'm really very sorry.
Kid-proof tablet..