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DVRs, Cable Boxes Top List of Home Energy Hogs
Hugh Pickens writes "Elisabeth Rosenthal writes that cable setup boxes and DVRs have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, causing an increase of over $10/month for a home with many devices, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator. The set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are running full tilt, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. 'People in the energy efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use,' says John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission. 'Companies say it can't be done or it's too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true. It can be done, and it often doesn't cost much, if anything.' The perpetually 'powered on' state is largely a function of design and programming choices made by electronics companies and cable and Internet providers, which are related to the way cable networks function in the United States. Similar devices in some European countries can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half and go into an optional 'deep sleep,' which can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent (PDF) compared with when the machine is active. Although the EPA has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes and has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013, cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency."
Do STBs really use more energy than things which push heat around?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are running full tilt, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use.
Isn't that kind of the point? If their drives and tuners weren't running then they couldn't record stuff while you were away. (I mean how else would it build up a buffer of the last 30 minutes of a show or record suggestions if it wasn't running.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
MythTV does this just fine ; it can turn off your computer, and turn it back on again when a recording is scheduled.
The only problem would be that when it boots into "recording" mode instead of "manually started", there's a different screen explaining it, which involves a single button press on the remote to put it into manual mode.
Call my cynical, but I think that the engineering department for these things are just told to leave it on all the time, because the perception in management is that the general public couldn't work this out.
Waiting to program while you are away is not an excuse to hog power. Only a wake-up function is required when the box is not actively recording.
The problem here is that the price of energy usage is largely hidden for the consumer, who can't make the connection between the purchase and an increased monthly bill. The price of the box itself is visible to the consumer who can discriminate according to price, but the fact that one box might cost him $100 less in the course of a year is invisible to him so he doesn't choose it even though he might have if he was aware of that fact.
One of the nice side effects of living in Finland is that the use of home appliances is free 9 months of the year. My house is heated with electric radiators; it doesn't matter how the electricity is converted into heat. The officials ran some tests to see if it mattered how optimally light bulbs etc were placed for heating but it turned out it made virtually no difference.
Just keep the curtains closed to convert light into heat.
Cable box manufacturers "do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency" because consumers don't have a choice with which to pressure them. Last time I got cable setup somewhere, we got a box from the cable company. There was no "pick from the list", the installer pulled it out of his truck, put it there, and left it. Supposedly I can go out and buy a 3rd party box because I'm on cable, but they're hard to find info on and properly investigate, and don't seem to provide any real benefits (and no one advertises energy efficiency). And if you're on something like U-Verse of FiOS, you're pretty much screwed, best I can tell. The manufacturers don't listen to consumers, they listen to cable companies because they buy the vast majority of the boxes. And the cable company doesn't give a rat's ass about your electric bill.
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
I have one such set-top box. I needed one because I still have a CRT (Which I turn OFF when not in use, with the big button in front) and my cable is all-digital. It's a Technisat DigitCorder K2 and it's a frigging piece of crap. They should fire all programmers that worked on it especially the UI team. Regardless, I am scared to turn it off, so I don't. Why? Because sometimes it simply doesn't want to boot up again.
The other reason is that I have to set my TV to "EXT1" to use it, which means the you shouldn't use the remote of the TV except for volume control (The digicorder only knows "silent" and "not very loud"). Now, I know this, and you probably don't have a problem with this, but expaining these technicalities to my wife doesn't work. So, I say "use this remote", which is the one of the TechniSat and use that.
So, it's on "full-power", 24/7 because I really don't want TV-support calls while I'm at work.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
My biggest complaint is the UI (Motorola box). When I press a button on the remote, it may or may not respond to it. That's ok, but the real problem is that it will queue up several button presses before acting on them, that's crap. I can't tell if the remote was pointing in the right direction or not. They need to do one of 2 things:
- respond immediately to a button press (blink a light, actually do what I want, something else)
- or only act on the first button press if it is too busy doing something else, not all of the presses because it was tied up doing god knows what
And that's all I have to say about that.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Imagine the power consumption of trolls keeping their computers on all day looking for websites to post goatse links to
The problem is that the buyer is the cable company. They don't pay for your electricity and they don't care if you do.
I mean, the end user is typically paying "rent" on the set-top box that the cable company provides, but it's not like you get much of a choice of models. Unless you go with TiVO or myth but I think those are in the minority.
Yoghurt
"...cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency."
Well, beyond the suspicions of some form of weird collusion between cable and electric companies, the lack of consumer pressure makes sense for obvious reasons. Those who can afford set-top boxes have usually paid for some kind of bundle package (cable/phone/Internet), and probably also have an HDTV in their home (HD package), as well as the most power-consuming set-top boxes are also DVRs, which is yet another upgrade.
Point is if consumers can afford $100+ every month for "entertainment", they're probably not too worried about a $10 increase in the electric bill.
Energy efficiency designs should not be deemed appropriate or justified based on consumer pressure anyway. Vendors should be doing it because it simply makes sense.
I view this as just one more example of the price everyone has to pay due to the closed, non-competitive, proprietary cable box. Scientific Atlanta? Wow, they are such huge powerhouses in cutting edge technical solutions. Imagine a world where the big electronics players all competed in the marketplace with set top boxes. Wow, I might no longer have to wait 15 minutes for my cable box to reboot, or deal with pathetic menu designs. Power reduction would fall into these designs as just another marketing tool.
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
One problem with modern electronics in general is that there's no real power button anymore. An STB can get into a knackered state and stop responding. What passes for a power button then could be completely worthless. I have one of my STBs on an external power switch for just this reason.
Many devices still draw power even when "off" because they aren't really off. They are in 'standby' because consumers like devices that start up quickly. It would not occur to most people to completely cut the power to a TV or STB in order to ensure they are not drawing power (or generating noise). Most consumers simply don't care.
The only way anything will change is if there's some sort of nanny state approach taken where the consumer doesn't have to take any responsibility at all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If I were to have a thousand devices that draw 1W, that would become the single largest permanent power drain in my home.
Is this actually a story? Who cares about a constant 25-50W power drain? Sure, it would be nice if the STBs powered some stuff down, but it's not going to change the world now is it?
Another terrible piece of sensationalist writing.
Wow, electricity prices in the US must be insane. Electric cars will never work for you.
275 / 365 / 24 = 31 Watts for the DVR in their chart. Which makes sense.
$10 / 30 / 24 = 1.39 cents per hour
(1000 / 31) * 1.39 = 44.8 cents per kw/h. Holy shit, that's insane (had to repeat it twice). I'm in Ontario and pay 6.8 cents (7.9 cents as a heavy user) per kwh.
I had heard that in some states it has gone as high as 15 cents per kwh. 45 cents, though? WOWOWOWOW!!!!!!111!!
Put the cable box and the TV (and game systems) on the power strip. When you aren't there using them, turn it off.
I upgraded to a multi-room DVR last year and not only did I eliminate 1 DVR, but the new box runs much cooler. I haven't done any tests, but it seems to be saving some electricity. The second box is a regular single tuner set top and it stays cold until it is turned on.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Piracy: Cheaper, more convenient, and more environmentally conscious. No packaging, no delivery to the store, no marketing materials to be printed, and saves electricity.
We have a satellite system, and some of the boxes use ~40W 24x7. Doesn't matter if you turn it on or off - the only thing that changes is the little light on the front goes off. My first clue that this was an energy hog was to see how much heat the thing was throwing off.
I asked/complained about this and got a number of explanations/excuses. The number one was that the box needs to keep the guide uptodate, but there has to be a way to handle this function without the whole thing running at full tilt. Many such boxes are now connected to the internet anyways, and thus could simply download the guide on-demand when powered up and not need to wait for
Some people put these things on power strips so they can power them off. Back when I had digital cable, I did this, but that box only took a minute or so to boot up. But the satellite boxes take over 5 minutes to boot up for reasons that are far from clear.
My view is fundamentally this. The cable/satellite companies aren't the ones paying the power bills, and thus they have no incentive to reduce the power consumption. The end users pay the power bill, but they get very little choices in terms of the boxes, and no ability to configure the thing to go into "deep sleep" mode. Even if a lot of people were to complain I imagine that they wouldn't do much about it - my only hope is in 2013 when the new EnergyStar standards go into effect.
Is it a hidden cost if my power company supplies me with a free air conditioner but I still have to pay $400 per month to run it?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Instead of having 2 or 3 DVRs, setup a central DVR that does all the recording for you. Then use specific, diskless, playback devices in the rooms with TVs. These are $40-$80 ea. Turning them off when you don't need them is trivial. Even when powered on, they use 5W of power. That central system probably needs to be on 24/7, but since it runs a full OS (Windows or Linux), you can spin down disks and use a $9, low power, video card. If standby actually works for your OS of choice, you can save even more power and be under 1W in that mode.
Avoid the cable box and cable DVR. Build your own.
I have 4 physical desktops acting as servers here in a 2900 sq ft home in the south. Electricity costs are about $850/yr or $75/month. That includes running HDTVs and multiple central A/Cs. I honestly do not see the big deal. Perhaps if I lived in California or other states where government and activists have screwed with power generation, I'd be paying $5000/yr. I don't know.
Most months, the bill is around $50, but for the 4 summer months, it is significantly higher due to A/C costs. That's with 4 physical PC systems running 10 VMs each, HDTV, TiVo, laptop, A/C, fridge, microwave ovens, routers, switches, UPSes, 4 ceiling fans running 24/7 and a few diskless HDTV playback devices (WD TV Live HD+). There are external disk arrays, external USB/eSATA drives too. Lots of battery chargers constantly working on Lithium-ion batteries and clocks with laser pointers displaying time on walls in 3 bdr. Ah, and dual 24" computer monitors that are never turned off. But nobody uses a hair dryer here. ;)
I'm not completely power-use agnostic. All my computers have 80% efficient PSUs, but that is more about being cooler and having less noise than power efficiency. Also, none of my current video cards require external power. Only bus-power is used, but I don't game. A GeForce GT 430 is the most powerful GPU here.
I always thought it was silly that our Tivos were difficult to turn off and instead designed to run constantly, recording two shows I'm not interested in watching, 24 hours a day.
Our new DirecTV DVRs have an "off" button on the remote that puts them in standby at least, so they only wake up to record shows I've asked it to.
26 inch LED LCD tv: 44 watts when in use.
Popcorn Hour: 8 watts
WRT54G Wireless router: 3-5 watts
My uplink 800Mhz Wifi link: 8 watts
So my entire entertainment with internet linkup only pulls 64 watts, 20 or less when the TV is off. The popcorn hour also spins down when not in use. So I'm using less power for my entertainment than a single incandescent light bulb.
Don't forget to clean the coils everyone. At least every 6 months.
So if its 8:15 and the person turns on the TV, their expectation would be that they could go back in time 15 minutes to catch the show from the beginning.
They'd be better off designing more efficient components, particularly power supplies.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
you need the box for VOD and SDV cable system need a add on tuner as well.
any ways even tru2way tv uses like 40W when off vs 1w-5w when not in tru2way mode.
FYI
Last month the Belgian cable provider Telenet announced new setup boxes. One of the (many) new features is less power consumption when idle. Only new customers or customers that switch to the new "Fiber" subscriptions (same monthly fee ) get the upgraded machines.
If an upgrade is possible in a small country like Belgium why shouldn't it be possible in/with bigger countries/cable providers?
Until such issues can be diagnosed easily and dealt with, it's going to be hard to create energy efficient appliances.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Correlation != Causation. Just because your frige is using a lot of power doesn't mean it is your PVR's fault! Sometimes I have to wonder why there are SO MANY stupid people on slashdot, when I am clearly so much smarter and more capable than anyone else around here.
I think you all missed the "s" at the end of configurations - "typical home entertainment configurations". My guess is (no, I didn't bother to read any articles) that typical home entertainment configurations involves more than 1 cable box. As many homes have 3 or 4 boxes on all the time they would probably use IN TOTAL more than the typical 1 refrigerator in a typical home. I actually turn my cable boxes on and off with the tv. Most people probably don't do this as it leads to stupid HDMI handshake errors. I get these occasionally - especially ESPN and it's 720p programming - but changing the channel seems to fix most errors. In short - many DVR and cable boxes which are typical in a home use more power than the typical 1 refrigerator. Attach the 3 or 4 tvs, a PS3, always on Wii, Xbox360 and a VCR or DVD or blu-ray player and you got a LOT of power in a household with a couple of teenagers.
Try $250 additional per month in the winter.
Gotta love electric heating! (For reference, I have a set of new Bryant Evolution heat pumps.)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
cause you can just clap your hands and wish electronics use less power, right?
$10/month? How far can electric cars go on $10 worth of juice? Leaf? Tesla? Others?
I do think it's somewhat silly that these cable boxes need to use that much power and haven't incorporated modern energy saving techniques. However, much like incandescent bulbs this only matters when the heat isn't running in your house. During the Winter in the southern US and Fall/Winter/Spring in the northern US, wasteful electric appliances just help to heat your house and reduce whatever bill you have for other sources of heat. This is the reason I think living somewhere "slightly chilly" is a greener. We are going to have to use electricity anyway, and electric devices will never be 100% efficient, therefore, the waste heat produced can be used to help heat a space. In climates where A/C is required, not only are you wasting energy to cool your living space, you are also wasting 2x as much as is wasted by any electronic device in your home.
A few years ago, we went through the house to replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs, and we ditched the CRT TVs for new LCD models. And for that matter, I sealed up a bunch of air leaks.
The result? Our AC system runs quite a bit less than the neighbors. Now AC systems don't last forever - those same neighbors had to replace their system and that was fairly expensive. Just this weekend another neighbor had theirs replaced. And ours is still going strong - it won't last forever, of course, but if I can squeeze another couple of years out of the thing as compared to the neighbors who have made no attempt to control electricity usage, I can save a significant amount of money.
My Dish Network 722k DVR box auto shuts down at a preset interval that you can customize, and unless recording always shuts down at 3am to apply any updates. It's still drawing a trickle of current, but not $10/month.
Well like most news stories these days, it sounds fantastic until you read the story and run the numbers.
First, to get their numbers above a (also very low-power fridge), they had to add a HD DVR and HD STB together, apart they would not be more.
Next, they state $10 / month, which must be using some of the most expensive electricity in the country as a reference point, using what I pay it's $3/month which is about ~4% of my TV bill, I guess I can live with that. Not saying they couldn't do better, but 30W isn't some crazy high number for a DVR.
I guess they get away with hand-waving HVAC cost by using some area of the country where that's not an issue, but that's where most of my power goes....
How is this the consumers fault? Make a more efficient product!
Have electronics manufacturers start making off buttons actually turn the damn stuff OFF! Not sleep. Not standby. Off.
Off buttons used to turn stuff off. Now they don't. It can't be that difficult or expensive to go back to the way it was.
Talking about electricity usage and then giving an example of $10/month is meaningless, since there are significant variations in the cost of power. Where I live, $10/month would be a continuous load of 166 watts for 30 days (assuming that it was "idle" 24x7 and all usage was a "drain"); even accounting for cooling load overhead (which of course isn't constant), that would be about 100 watts. I guarantee you my TiVo isn't pulling 100 watts, nor is everything in my entertainment center combined when it is turned off.
TiVo is trying to lower their power usage; the next box they want to introduce is targeted at customers with digital-only cable, so they want to remove the analog tuners and video compression circuitry. IIRC they said that would reduce the power consumption from 32 to 24 watts (as well as cut the box cost by a good bit). However, they have to get an FCC waiver to sell a box with a digital-only cable tuner.
My Comcast HD cable box pull so much power shut down that I can't leave it in my equipment cabinet with the doors open or it will over heat. The temperature in the cabinet with the doors shut and the cable box off rises to over 100 F. I can't unplug the box when not in use because it will 'forget' my settings and it takes hours for it to scan the network before it is usable again. BIg POS, thank's Motorola!
You pay once for the electricity that the DVR box wastes.
And again, to remove that heat from your home during the cooling season.
If $20 per month is really that insignificant to you, please PM me your address and I will enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope for you to place $100 in. Thanks!
I am pretty sure that cable co's scramble most of their digital channels, requiring their descrambling equipment. You definitely cannot plug cable directly into your tv and get all channels, with Rogers here in Canada.
In Europe most cable companies use pretty much standard encryption, and most TV equipemment (modern digital flat TVs, digital TV receiver, internal digital TV PCI/PCIe cards, etc. - In practice everything but external USB USB mini-dongles) comes with support for "Common Interface (CI)" a type of PC-Card interface which is used to hold a decryption module.
So in theory you could directly plug the cable into the TV, as long as you plug a CI module compatible with the encryptions used by the cable company, and as long as you insert a valid chip card into the module (the one that came with the STB for example).
You'll only loose the crazy strange proprietary extensions (special menus, special channels, etc.) that the company put into the customized STB software.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You know what's more of a power hog? Retail spaces that insist on 100% artificial lighting. Retail spaces that pull enough wattage into lighting that even during a Minnesotan winter they are forced to run AC units (never think to simply open a window either...). You know what's also more of a power hog? Food markets that have open faced refrigerated shelving. ... escalators; water fountains; CRT based televisions; hot water heaters, etc...
I'm sure it'd be great and all for device manufacturers to put their device configurations on non-volatile memory so they can power off. If however you're serious about energy efficiency, going after consumer electronics is like picking pennies out of the fountain when you have an ATM a few steps away.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I heat my house with my DVRs and set top boxes!
Have gnu, will travel.
It doesn't matter; even if you do go with TiVO or myth you still need the cable/satellite box, because -- especially for digital or HD -- only those are "allowed" to tune the damn signal!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This hyperbole filled article, replete with its exaggerated math "errors", appeared throughout the mainstream media over the weekend. It appears to be an attention grab and cry of wolf form yet another wannabe greenie group.
Most DVRs consume less than 50 watts of electricity. Even with its continuous operation it's far less than the typical American refrigerator consumes in the course of a year. As for an air conditioner, well, that's ludicrous.
My always on HD DVR hogs an "astonishing" 25watts which translates to 10 cents of electricity per day or $37 per annum.
Oh, Lovey! Throw another dime on the DVR, woul dyo dear? The A/C is a bit chilly in here.
The big power draw with Tivo and likely other DVR is that it is *always* recording, even if nothing is scheduled. This is what allows a user to turn on the set, notice that something good is in progress and then back up to when the show started (or 20 minutes which is the Tivo limit) and start watching. Obviously, if the DVR shuts down when not instructed to record, this won't happen.
There are ways around this limitation but they add complexity, will need to be thought out and explained to end users.
They're being used to monitor you within the privacy of your own homes.
Not just talking about your viewing habits either.
They have digital eyes and ears just as PC's do.
I'm calling bullshit on this if they claim $10/month is the "largest drain." Your climate control costs will vary by your location and house size, but they are pretty significant for many people.
For example: I live in the desert, so it is mostly A/C here. I have a new, efficient, dual-stage A/C unit. A couple months ago when it was idle, my electric bill was about $45. This month, when it was on a lot, my bill was $120. I've made no big changes in lifestyle, don't have tons of new electronics or anything like that. All that changed is the ambient temperature has gone up a whole lot. So about $75 in cooling costs, and it'll be more next month.
Now in cold climates it can get much worse. First off, the temperature deltas for cooling are much less. even in rather hot climates, it rarely gets much above 45 degrees C. So you have about a 20 degree delta to room temperature. Hell, call it 25 degrees and day you keep it cool inside. Well heck, finding a cold climate that goes down to 0 isn't hard, most do. In fact most get much colder than that. Heck in many Canadian cities you can see -20, -30, even -40 degrees in the winter.
Well the bigger the delta between the ambient temperature and the temperature you'd like, the more energy you have to spend to reach that.
Then there's the fact that cooling is "more than 100% efficient" in terms of energy usage to cooling done. Since A/Cs move heat (heat pumps would be a more proper name for them) they can move more than 1 watt of energy with each watt of power given. an efficient AC will have a COP of 3.4-5.2 meaning which means for each watt of power it uses, it moves 3.4-5.2 watts of heat out of the house.
You don't get that with heating. While A/Cs can be run in reverse as heat pumps, and often are in warm climates to cover minor heating needs, they don't work well when temperatures go below freezing so they aren't used in cold climates. As such you get at best 1 watt of heat per watt of energy spent (it can be less for some gas heating as heat gets wasted).
I'm not saying that these things shouldn't be made more efficient, but lets' be real here. Unless someone lives in an extremely temperate climate year round, climate control is going to be their major energy cost.
...since my cat's favorite resting spot is on top of either one or the other of our two cable boxes.
1. Electric heat is less efficient and more costly than other types, so even in the winter it's still costing you
2. In the summer, your paying for heat you don't want, and paying for more electricity to run your AC to counter that heat.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
There should only be one DVR: at the cableco local plant. Then my programmed shows are merely a shopping list for quick retreval.
Bonus: Forgot to set the DVR? Bam! Cableco didn't!
Bonus 2: HD capacity is a thing of the past.
Bonus 3: EPA gives an Energy Star rating to providers for not wasting massive amounts of energy, and maybe a bit of a kickback from the power companies for lessening the burden.
And the Content Lords can go hang their mouths on a hook; the Cablevision decision by the Supremes green-lights this in toto. Plus, now they will be against power savings and the environmental argument too.
Less efficient how? In general? When produced through a Carnot Cycle? When produced from coal? If the electricity were generated from a nuclear power station or solar, it is most certianly *very* efficeint. Yes it *can* cost more... but that's only if your house has some other cheaper form of heat. Mine doesn't, and to replace it with something that does, would take 15-20 years to recoup the savings, provided the maintenance and/or cost of fuel doesn't rise appreciably WRT to electricity prices. I agree it doesn't help in the summer, which is why I stated that in my original reply.
As a hardware design engineer at a telecom company, I can assure you this is all part of the design. Or more accurate, the lack of power efficiency and power saving has been chosen as the more "cost-efficient" way of creating that product. The ISPs care about the cost of the box, because they offer this to their customer as part of the service bundle and "average Joe" thinks it's for free. Therefore the manufacturer of that box is under pressure to get the cheapest solution which still complies to the requirements.
The only way to improve power efficiency is an intervention of the government. For Europe, see CoC regulation (http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/html/standby_initiative.htm). It isn't mandatory yet, but a lot of companies already use it.
HD Tivos use Cable Card for cable and always have.
There is no HD Tivo that can "record from the cable box" like an S1 Tivo.
Recording analog HD is strictly an HTPC thing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Instead of focusing on taking us back to the stone age, perhaps politicians should focus more on building more power plants. California is the worst when it comes to this. Stop hugging the trees and get us some more power already!
That's not how my Cisco HD PVR works. If it's "off" (standby) it's not recording. I know this because the HDD usually spins up when I power it on, and I can't scrub the current channel back beyond that point in time.
But in standby, I can hear the HDD spin up for a minute or two, then back down for maybe 10 minutes, then the cycle repeats. I assume it's updating the program guide (they really should write this to flash memory).
I have it hooked up to a Kill-a-watt though, and the difference is negligible--powered on (or standby with HDD spun up), it's 28-30 W. Standby (and only if HDD is idle) is 22-25W. It's ridiculous that it needs that much juice on standby. It's like it's processing HD video and audio 100% of the time, even on standby when it's not outputting anything.
They could definitely take a page from the computer world, which figured out "sleep" mode two decades ago. My 42" LED TV uses less than 1 W on standby, why can't PVRs and STBs cut power to almost everything except RAM and remote receiver?
I like the focus on continuous draw.
I like the attention to the issue of DVRs.
I dislike TFA language "have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes"..
My tivo uses 35 watts while doing nothing. My PC uses 150 watts while doing nothing. PC hardware manufacturers need to do a much better job with power management. If my fricking video card used as much power as my tivo while idle I would be happy.
I'm willing to pay $10 or whatever it is a year to have the 30 minute buffer on both tuners always available to me.
I'm not willing to continue to pay for a PC to consume 150 watts continuous while doing nothing.
Except for the HD TiVo, CableCard doesn't exist. If you dispute this, find me a counterexample: either a current-model HDTV or a consumer TV capture card (stuff built into Microsoft "Media Center PCs" that you can't buy separately doesn't count).
For all practical purposes, only cable and satellite leased devices can access digital HD. Everything else has to connect via component video and an IR-blaster, at best.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I would welcome if the EPA implemented and slowly phased in the ENERGY STAR program for all electronics sold with their very nice Watt-Hours (US) yellow stickers since this would start to bring the issue of power efficiency in appliances forward and allow the general populous see the actual numbers behind their products.
Solution 1 - Cancel your Cable or Satellite
I cancelled my DirecTV satellite subscription a few years back and don't miss it yet still get all my TV entertainment from the Internet and the Web without having to fork over $100+ to the cable company to subsidize their QVC shopping channel and the other 299-channels that I will never tune to or ever watch. My television viewing habits are now focused only on the very few shows that I do watch and my enjoyment of television has increased as I no longer waste any time on the increasingly annoying and idiotic product advertisements.
Solution 2 - Build your own Digital Video Recorder computer
HTPC - iAtom 1.8 2C, 2GB DDR3, 40GB SSD, 2TB HDD, Blu-Ray, ATSC+ClearQAM, Mini-ATX, 120mm Fan - Subtotal: $586.91
XBMC - Media Center Front-End with (Multi-OS Windows, Linux, Apple, etc.) - Does Not Support Recording or Capture, Playback Only
MythTV - Digital Video Recorder (Linux) - Does Support Capture and Recording
I build my own HTPC using Intel Atom and nVidia Ion 2 running XBMC front-end on Ubuntu Linux with a 40 GB SSD, 1.5 TB HDD, 2 GB RAM, and AverMedia Digital Capture card for Over The Air TV (that I never setup with MythTV and don't watch anyway). This little box has HDMI direct connection to my 50-inch TV so I get full video output and also fully accelerated MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (ASP, and AVC H.264) decoding at 1080p without dropping any frames thanks to nVidia Ion 2 (aka Ion Next Generation) all on the low-power 1.8 GHz dual-core Intel Atom processors while only utilizing 5-7% CPU when doing playback. It is also dead quiet due to the SSD, WD Green HDD, quiet liquid 120mm ball-bearing fan, and fan-less motherboard cooling.
The whole box uses 45 Watts while idle, 50 Watts while watching a show, and 55 Watts when I do a full load test on all the components at once. I leave this box on permanently and it serves as my server for SSH, FTP, DDNS, Wake-On-LAN, BitTorrent, etc. It is a lot more energy friendly than any other desktop or server I ran previously in my house for same Linux server duties and I can use it to watch TV while it does all those other things in the background.
Solution 3 - Do Not Use Your Desktop as Media Box
For heavy processing or encoding, I use the desktop computer but keep it on only while I'm sitting down at it and that beast with the two monitors eats 465 Watts of power idle and will hit ~550 Watts if I hit the video card hard. That's a 10-fold increase in power utilization so I always turn my desktop off when I'm done with it and boot it back up in just a few seconds thanks to the new Intel 320 160GB SSD (upgraded from Intel 80GB G1 SSD). The two 3-second pauses during boot-up to go into the Silicon Image and Intel RAID menus take longer than load Windows 7 entirely otherwise my computer would be up in under 10-seconds.
I got rid of my satellite almost two years ago. Only run OTA(which usually looks/works great) and NetFlix. I have no regrets. One thing I noticed right away is that without the vast wasteland of channels to encourage channel/program surfing, and with NetFlix as my real entertainment portal, I watch less, and watch only what I really set out to.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The typical oil furnace costs around 400-500/month to run. Natural gas is about 150-250. It also doesn't stink, doesn't hurt the environment as much, doesn't require as much servicing, doesn't eat plastics in your house when it dies, etc. etc.
OMG, why isn't everything converted to Joules yet! ;)
I8-D
At best?
A completely DRM free recording is not such a bad thing really.
The "at best" solution was good enough for 2 generations of Tivos. It's really not as scary as some try to make it out to be.
Not great for the whole "power consumption" thing though.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I want DRM-free access to the raw MPEG stream, as a matter of principle.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
we (yes, i work for directv) seem to be leading the pack when it comes to energy star stb's and have for at least a couple years now. the usual pros and cons of satellite vs cable and directv-service vs other-services apply of course. all in all, despite the hate directv has drawn from slashdot in the past, i think it's a pretty compelling choice nowadays.
you've really hit upon three fully-scalable, widely-deployable solutions here. i can't imagine how any of the daytime-drama-watching, qvc-product-buying masses out there could not figure any of these out on their own. actually, come to think of it, maybe they're already on to "Solution 3."
My fridge does something useful as it runs 24/7 - it keeps my food from spoiling. My cable box exists soley so Comcast can screw me for a nother $8 a month.