Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Wow, you seriously didn't even glance at the article, did you? STBs in "idle" mode aren't any less energy hungry than when they're "on". The only way to turn most of them "off" is by unplugging them.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
"...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."
If all boxes could do that, we'd also see the crisis in our education system averted, as the kids have no reason to stay home anymore...well, I guess you'd have to hack PlayStations to not play during the day too, but that shouldn't be too hard.
An important change for education.
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
Don't blame the users. More than half the blame lies on those boxes. They're practically full blown computers complete with hard drives and long boot up times of over a minute--- and almost no power management, and that's definitely not the fault of the users. Linux can be booted in 5 seconds, and could be made even faster with things such as the ancient technology known as ROM. No excuse for boxes taking so long to boot, and dodging the problem by just having it always stay on. Long ago, we were introduced to the "Power" button to get around the requirement that "Off" means off, with VCRs that would lose all their programming whenever power was interrupted. The industry has completely punted on this issue.
We could have had a standard for sensing the state of connected hardware so that if the TV is off, and no recording is being made, the box will sleep. Actually, we do have that, but the boxes can just ignore it. Or perhaps we could have more integration, with set top box functionality built into the TV. There are a whole lot of things that could have been done. Lot of cabling is still carrying analog signals. Instead, a top priority in the design of things like HDMI was that users should have to burn even more power on useless anti-piracy measures, such as HDCP.
I have a very simple solution. I don't have cable TV. Saves me a bundle.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Funny -- I plugged my cableco-provided STB into my kill-a-watt meter to check just this.
When turned ON, sending a signal to the TV. Power usage = 20 watts.
When turned OFF, it shuts off the output and sends a blank screen to the TV. Power usage = 20 watts.
Indeed, that green power LED in front is just a comfort light that does not much of anything.
While true, 20W running all day every day still comes to 1226 kWH per year, which is 2.75 times as much as the set-top box discussed in the article. Your Wifi link alone, at 8 watts, draws more power per year (490 kWH).
Those numbers surprise me, and make think there must be a lot of lower-hanging fruit around the average household.
Ehm, the CRT is not on standby when I push the big button in front. All LEDs go out. No reaction to remote. The only way to turn it on is to push the big button again. I doubt it uses much, if anything at all.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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'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.