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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."
At least in the colder regions of the country, "heating" doesn't usually show up on the electric bill. Electric heating is extremely convenient to install, and good for point work; but the inefficiency of burning something, converting it to electricity, running that through transmission lines, just to dump it into a big resistor at the other end is a bit much.
Air conditioning is likely a lot worse; but, because everybody knows that it is extremely energy intensive, thermostatic regulation has been standard since the mechanisms for achieving it were bimetallic, and microproccessor based scheduling systems creep in pretty quickly once you get away from the nastiest of basic window units.
By contrast, it sounds like team STB has somehow managed to miss Every Single Development in computer and embedded device power management in the last decade. Ironically, they've probably even managed to achieve an outcome where Intel muscling in with their x86 (barely) SoC designs would actually be more efficient than highly-integrated task specific media SoCs; because at least they would incorporate their laptop power management techniques more or less for free. Impressive work.
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.
Sounds like lazy programming.
"Hey, don't you think it would be nice to turn off the unit to save energy and turn it on before it records a show?"
"Well John, that's a nice idea, but I just can't imagine a use case where that's necessary. Besides, it's not our problem."
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."
Obtaining the precise numbers would be a bit hairy; but I suspect so.
Depending on the fuel in use, your heat->mechanical energy conversion will always live in the shadow of that spoil-sport Carnot, along with any engineering limitations. In practice, I'm told that you get something in the vicinity of 30-50 percent(of the fuel at the plant, it still has to be shipped there, though at least bulk shipping is easier, per unit goods, than household delivery). After that, you still have the generator that the turbine is driving, along with the power transmission apparatus.
By contrast, since heat is the desired product, the only 'waste' heat in an onsite burn is whatever goes up with the stack gasses and whatever goes to the delivery truck. At least with oil heat, in the northeast, we had about one delivery a year. Unless the truck managed to burn half its payload getting to us, I suspect that we came out ahead.
Peripheral electrical generation, with heat engines, is something you do only for backup purposes; because small heat engines pretty much inevitably suck more than huge ones; but when all you want is heat, the only real efficiency issues are the engineering problems of cooling the exhaust gasses before they leave the premises.
If it were an open marketplace like, say, refrigerators, you could slap a green sticker on it and perhaps differentiate yourself. But that's not what is going on here. A tremendous problem in the particular case of these devices is that very few of them are sold directly to consumers: they are sold by the millions to cable companies, who then sell/lease them to their consumers with the myth that "If you want cable, you must use this box". The cable companies don't give a damn about how much power the boxes use: they aren't paying the bill. The consumers are largely oblivious, because it isn't their equipment, and they just want their insipid reality TV shows. Everyone with half a brain can look at this situation and say: gee, this is stupid, let's make the boxes use less power. But there is no incentive for any party to do it on their own. This is a clear case where government regulation makes a lot of sense.
Don't think power, because Watts are really not the unit to be using. You should compare energy; Watt-Hours.
Let's say you have a typical refrigerator that uses ~150 watts average for 5 minutes total operation every hour. That's 150 * 5/60 = 12.5 watt-hours of energy. Your STB uses 25W on standby, which is constant. So that's 25 * 60/60 = 25 watt-hours of energy. Fully twice as much as your refrigerator.
YMMV of course but it's quite plausible a seemingly minor appliance uses more electricity over the course of a day than a major appliance. Those "Vampire Loads" can be a real killer!
=Smidge=
Actually you have calculated average watts (which is what is really relevant). Your numbers are "watt hours per hour", cancelling to watts, not watt hours.
Because a watt-second is so small a unit it's practically useless outside academia.
Now get outta here before I start converting everything to BTUs!
=Smidge=