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Cable Boxes Are the 2nd Biggest Energy Users In Many Homes
SpzToid (869795) writes 224 million U.S. cable TV set-top boxes combined consume as much electricity as produced by four giant nuclear reactors, running around the clock. They have become the biggest single energy user in many homes, apart from air conditioning. Cheryl Williamsen, a Los Alamitos architect, has three of the boxes leased from her cable provider in her home, but she had no idea how much power they consumed until recently, when she saw a rating on the back for as much as 500 watts — about the same as a washing machine. A typical set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power, costing about $8 a month for a typical Southern California consumer. And the devices use nearly as much power turned off as they do when they are turned on. The article outlines a voluntary industry agreement that should make a dent in this power consumption (it "calls for a power reduction in the range of 10% to 45% by 2017"), but makes the point that much larger gains are possible: "Energy experts say the boxes could be just as efficient as smartphones, laptop computers or other electronic devices that use a fraction of the power thanks to microprocessors and other technology that conserves electricity. Ideally, they say, these boxes could be put into a deep sleep mode when turned off, cutting consumption to a few watts. At that rate, a box could cost less than $1 a month for power, depending on how much it is used."
If you've got a better way to toast a cheese sandwich while watching tv, I'd like to hear it.
I have basic cable so I can plug right into my TV. However with digital TV being common why arn't more TV's handling it so you don't need the cable box.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Maybe if you have three cable boxes and a monthly cable bill, you can save a lot MORE money by just canceling cable.
Got rid of Charter two years ago - now I have a ChannelMaster for OTA, and a couple of Roku boxes. Feels nice not spending that $90 a month.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
even when they are off. at least the older Scientific Atlanta ones did. time warner cable in NYC has new Cisco and Motorola ones that are a lot more efficient and don't get nearly as hot
If it consumes more than one Watt, it's nowhere near "deep sleep".
I'm very, very surprised that refrigerators aren't #2. Or possibly electric water heaters, in houses that have them.
I've got a couple of Comcast DVRs instead of cable boxes... with a Cable box, you should be able to power off when not in use, but with a DVR, this could be a bit trickier... I suppose it could do some smart scheduling where it turns itself off unless actively recording shows - keep a sub-section with scheduling info running so it knows to spin up a few minutes before recording a show...
Still, I should think that DVR boxes on a per-box basis would be a bigger issue than regular cable boxes.
As for most electricity in the home? For me, the electric tumble drier and the electric oven/range (some day, I hope to replace with gas) would get second billing, then my computers / server.
The Digital Sorceress
Seems you can't buy any form of digibox these days without some serious firmware bugs whether its just picture freezing , "buffering" remote control key presses until it can be bothered to process them, missed recordings for no apparent reason or just complete crashes requiring a hard reboot. Or if like me you were dumb enough to buy a Sagemcom box - then all of the above.
rating on back is not power draw, you might get close to that during startup. normal draw is less than 140 watts, put it in standby and get 15 watts
I once worked in engineering group that also had couple of architects, we called them "farcitechs" and now you all know why
Just bring the line in and go with a standard hardware. Stop charging me a monthly fee for every single TV in the house, whether it is on or not.
let us go back to receiving channels using the built in digital tuners of modern TVs rather than scrambling everything in sight? Oh, I forgot, they can make another $10.00-$20.00 a month per TV because consumers are sheep...
Apparently EU policy requires that devices which are off or in standby use no more than 0.5 watts.
Whether it's actually enforced, I have no idea.
Number one consumer of electric power: Air conditioning unit. THOUSANDS OF WATTS
Number two consumer of electric power: Refrigerator. HUNDREDS OF WATTS
Cable boxes don't come in number two and they don't consume 35 watts.
So if you're keeping track not only is not "number 2" (a dubious distinction) but its use of electric power is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE below what's chewing up power. In fact, here in Arizona our A/C runs about 20 hours a day. That uses more power per day than the cable box uses in a year. I could ditch cable altogether (I have Comcast so it's a constant thought) and my power bill won't change by 1%.
How do I know? I use a http://www.amazon.com/P3-Inter... kill-a-watt. The cable box draws less than 1 amp (12W) and that's while it's on and it's the big Motorola unit just like the picture in the original article.
Do you like facts and statistics and data upon which to base conclusions? You should get one of these kill-a-watts. They're awesome and they're quickto end stupid discussions that say you should unplug your cable box.
Off to unplug my wifi router. I hear it draws 0.5A.
E
It's called a power bar. With a mechanical switch.
Which is it? 500 watts or 35 watts? This summary and title are completely ridiculous, I can think of plenty of other things that are using more power in my home than a cable box. Refrigerator, freezer, washer, dryer, hair blow dryer, desktop computer, television, central heating/air conditioning, range (if it's electric), power tools/garage, home theatre system, the list goes on and on.
The reason the "500 Watts!!!" is disingenuous, is because many cable boxes have a switched outlet that allow you to plug in a television set to the back of it. Back in the good ol' days, you could click on the cable box and the TV would turn on as well, if it was plugged into the back. That CRT might draw as much as 500 watts, so that's what it's rated for. With the advent of universal remotes, electronic controls in sets that forget the last power setting and the need for constant power to keep settings and "quick-on" for many sets, this is now an antiquated port that's just a hold over from the olden days of cable TV.
The STB might be the 2nd biggest energy user in many homes, but I wouldn't bet on *most* homes.
The 500W rating might have been for power passthrough (master/slave system) maybe?
My stereo can pass through power to e.g. a subwoofer, so only when I actually turn on the stereo the subwoofer is powered. The cable box could similarly have a power passhtrough for either the TV or the audio system, which is rated at 500 Watts.
as more cable companies encrypt all signals - requiring cable boxes to receive any channel, even broadcast networks and 'expanded basic' (what formerly was accessible without any cable company supplied box with ordinary 'cable ready' televisions)..
so the solution here, of course, is to eliminate the need for cable boxes for the vast majority of subscribers that do not pay extra for premiums (hbo, showtime, etc), and carry channels in the clear (clearqam) and go back to tamper resistant connectors, lock boxes (both still in use by most providers), and in-line traps to regulate which channels are available on a per-drop (customer) basis. the technology is old, tried and true, and works.. even with phone and internet services on the same drop.. clearqam should be the 'new' cable ready standard.
Just measured my old Scientific Atlanta box (that actually looks just like the ones in the article's pictures).
I get 8 Watts while running, 0.9 Watts in standby. It slightly peaks when I switch channels.
"four giant nuclear plants?" Dammit, that's extremely useless a unit of measurement.
Literally everyone should know by now that the standard SI unit for power consumption is medium-sized town.
So, how many medium sized town do those cable boxes consume in total?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
500W, I call BS.
With that kind of power, my entertainment system would be burning up.
Anyway, I ditched all forms of pay TV, relying on internet and over the air.
The computer used for the TV goes into sleep mode, and uses 1W per my kill-a-watt.
When running the AMD 45W quad core and SSD usually run the whole box ar 30-40 W at moderate activity (like playing Pandora or watching youTube.
"Cheryl Williamsen, a Los Alamitos architect, has three of the boxes leased from her cable provider in her home, but she had no idea how much power they consumed until recently, when she saw a rating on the back for as much as 500 watts" Rating doesn't equal consumption. I can put a 1000W power supply in my computer but just watching youtube videos doesn't mean it's consuming all 1000W. It consumes far less than the 1000W unless the system demands it. Only way to know how much a device like this consumes is to measure it. One inexpensive way to do this is the KilloWatt meter.
Those things only consume a few Watts. This is just uninformed hyperbole.
The world is rapidly moving away from the cable model... and the cable box itself is no exception. Therefore, the solution to this issue is pretty clear: transition away from big box cable endpoints to Roku or AppleTV endpoints. This moves customers into the future by shifting away from a DVR model to a streaming model, and it shifts away from insanely power-hungry boxes to devices which typically use about 1 to 3 watts at peak use.
(It's actually a simple solution to multiple problems. Unfortunately, the cable industry has been resisting these types of moves for so long, that even though they've effectively already lost this battle on multiple fronts, (for all practical purposes) they still resist just because of muscle memory.)
I recently moved from a Comcast only area to a U-verse only area (monopolies yay!!!)
I figured the new, smaller u-verse box would be better on power, but the damn thing is quite warm to the touch, even when its "powered off" from the front panel when no one is watching TV.
I don't have the exact figure, but that heat is not getting created for free (especially in the summer when it has to be pumped outside by the AC).
I have taken to switching the power off at the power strip when I'm not watching. The only downside to that is there is a bit of a lag in my trip into the land of mindnumbing entertainment as the box has to boot up and figure out who it is each time.
Basic problem is people rent them instead of buy.
The cable industry pushed for this because they don't want people owning their cable box - then we would have the legal right to modify them.
But because they own the box, they don't care how much WE pay for the electricity to run it.
smells like dark fusion we got going on in 'ere?
I don't expect every end-user to be knowledgeable on electronic devices, but I do expect people who write these articles to be. That woman was probably reading the label on the power supply, which likely is capable of delivering 500W but the cable box is unlikely to consume that much. You're looking at an embedded processor that's a system-on-a-chip or close to it, support components (at most, video and ethernet), a small fan, a small phosphor display and, at most, two hard disks. We're talking 200W.
I've probably wasted too much time on this already, because the very next line of the article says "35 watts", which I think is actually far too low.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Currently, DirecTV has 6 models of STBs (set top boxes): three HD DVR, one HD non-DVR, one SD DVR, one SD non-DVR. Sending firmware upgrades to all of 6 device types adding a user-set deep-sleep mode would be amazing, the immediate effects of which would be massive nationwide! Generally, I don't have anything recording in the middle of the night--or it's a one-off repeat that I don't care about. Offer 4 simple options: 1) deep sleep & not record during user-specified times (e.g. 1am-7am and 11am-4pm); 2) not-so-deep-sleep and wake to record during specified times (e.g. wakes 10 minutes before a recording time); 3) sleep based on x-hours of inactivity; 4) no power management (e.g. for insomniacs).
Currently, my DirecTV HD-DVR (non-Genie) box offers a "lower power" mode that I can't adjust, that it goes into after 4 hours of inactivity. But I have no control over how the time is defined, etc. And it pointlessly reminds me that it went into low-power mode & I have to click out of it--something users may choose to disable just to not get that pointless annoyance...
Let's not forget that these devices are "computers" with power savings in the processors, motherboards, OSes (Linux?), hard drives, etc., that DirecTV, Comcast, and others chose not to enable. Let's face it, DirecTV, you're ~20% of the problem (based on US market share), now become part of the solution...
Oh, and one last thing... How the fuck do some of your boxes have the "Energy Star" logo??? Is it because the boxes themselves are efficient & you choose not to implement those efficiencies?
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
But if your new TV has a standby power consumption of less than 1W, it's thanks to the EU "anti-market" behavior of simply requiring it and the effect spilling over to other markets. You know what to do.
She's reading the outlet capacity. No cable box draws 500W.
If they are anything like the boxes I just turned in to Time Warner I can imagine they take a monster amount of power. They looked (and functioned) like they were built in a Soviet area tractor factory. I just got DTV and there is one small DVR for my entire home and a super small (~1"x6"x6") box for each additional TV.
If you think non-standardization is not useful, you're just on the wrong side of the line where money changes hands.
The entire industry is designed to keep out people who aren't paying, and to extract as much as possible (what the companies call a "fair share") from those who do.
You could look at it another way: Why should a single person with one TV pay as much as a family of 4 with as many TVs? A boarding house with 8 room mates, each with their own room and TV? Just be lucky they haven't decided to charge extra when you have company over. Yet.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Plop a "kill-a-watt" on your cable box and turn it on, note the power used. now hit the "off" button the remote. See how the power use did not drop. That is because "OFF" is simply blanking the screen and turning off the front led's and display.
It's why most pro AV installs will put the cable box if it's not a DVR type, on a power sequencer that the control processor will turn on and off with the system. The drawback is some of the newer cable boxes take forever to boot after power is restored.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh, and one last thing... How the fuck do some of your boxes have the "Energy Star" logo??? Is it because the boxes themselves are efficient & you choose not to implement those efficiencies?
Remember, the EnergyStar logo is pretty much meaningless. Heck, a few years ago a (fake) gasoline powered alarm clock received the EnergyStar logo as part of an audit.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
With the Genie additional TVs only need a super small STB. That is a HUGE power savings over the multi gigawatt cable boxes.
A typical set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power, costing about $8 a month for a typical Southern California consumer.
A "typical Southern California consumer" pays less than 20 cents per kWh.
35 Watts * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = 25,200 Watt hours or 25 Kilowatt hours.
25 Kilowatts * $0.20/Kilowatt hour = $5.00
I have my LG 42" LCD, my ONKYO Receiver, and my Sony Blu-Ray all plugged into a power strip.
Connected to the them are a digital antennae for OTA, an ethernet connection for NetFlix, and a Linux pc for everything else.
Cable?
Satellite?
Are you kidding me?
Do people still pay for that crap?
Who are these people that stay beholden to the most despicable industry in America?
My linux pc goes to "sleep" when I'm not using it...
When I'm done with the rest of them, I power off the rest, then turn off the power strip.
I've been doing it this way for years...
Never had any issues, except with Sony's bullshit user/login setup on their Blu-Ray players, but that's another story...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Water heaters definitely uses more energy than a set-top box could ever hope to consume - at least in a home where someone shower every day. It is sometimes the single biggest user of energy - in well-insulated houses that neither need much heating or cooling.
A smart system would use waste heat from the AC (and fridge) to heat water - well, we can dream.
I recall back when the XBox 360 and PS3 were all the rage on the market someone pointed out how absurdly power hungry they were (particularly in comparison to the Wii, which used less power while running than the PS3 used while sleeping). With the newest consoles from Sony and Microsoft out, and their respective camps declaring those to be the greatest thing since air itself, it would be interesting to know how they compare for wattage against a cable box. Being as many dedicated gamers don't want to ever turn their boxes off, I would expect they are wasting more power than most cable boxes.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Remember, the EnergyStar logo is pretty much meaningless.
Oh no, it's not meaningless, it's just useless. It does have meaning, but it's meaning no one should care about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My power company solved this problem for me by shipping out (at no additional charge) a power strip with 1 master and several slave outlets. The TV is plugged into the master outlet, and everythign else into the slave outlets. When the TV is off, the slave outlets are automatically switched off. So regardless of whether the cable box / dvd player / name your random device would prefer to live in standby mode, it can't. Sure, there is a 20 second delay when I turn the TV on while the box syncs itself back up with the network, but that's a small price to pay.
But how much power is that in libraries of congress?
Kinda like buying a Power supply for a pc, you need the 700w version to start the spinning disks
Then why don't more PC power supplies support staggered startup, with some ports starting a couple seconds later than others? That'd allow getting the drives and fans spun up by the time the kernel starts to mount data drives without drawing too much current at once.
How much of this power draw is necessary to run the various DRM schemes?
Is DRM destroying the environment?
Does DRM necessitate mountaintop removal mining?
Can a set top box in deep sleep mode still spy on you through the fancy new video conferencing camera built into your new smart TV?
So what you're saying is that, if I cut the cord, not only will I save on my cable bill, but I'll also save on my electricity bill?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
... the refrigerator has to be a bigger draw then the stupid cable box.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Hahahaha
I have a TV in every room, it's called my iPad. I watch Amazon Prime, Netflix, HBOGO, and Xfinity on it.
I have a 40 inch LCD TV in my den, but usually prefer the iPad.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
It's insane that a stupid cable box takes as much power in 2014. The Apple TV has a 6W built-in power supply and I'm pretty sure it never goes that high. The standby power requirements are probably in the mW range, too.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The compressor is not running all the time.
But it runs a lot more than it used to. A sales associate at a Sears store told me that a smaller compressor that runs longer, as found in newer refrigerators, is more efficient than a larger compressor that runs in shorter spurts. That and it keeps the temperature more even.
I guess I'm the outlier, but I have a single cable box in my home, and it's off 97% of the time. Is it really necessary to have 4,5,6..etc cable boxes in people's homes?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
the boxes need a data stream all the time and most cable systems are on the slow OOB data bus that can take 20-30 mins to fill up the guide
In Soviet Russia, cable TV watches you!
Have gnu, will travel.
in canada you can buy the box with out mirroring / outlet fees*.
* some systems may bill you an outlet fee for having more then 4 boxes / outlets
I'm not buying this for one second... The only way that the cable box could possibly be the 2nd-largest consumer of energy would be if nobody in that house took showers, did laundry, or washed dishes, as a water heater uses an insane amount of electricity. And I'm pretty sure a fridge is going to be up there in energy-usage also.
In all fairness, the article and headline did say "many homes", but what use is a statistic if it only applies to slovenly basement-dwelling otaku?
As others have pointed out, it's also written most sloppily. The max rating of a box (500 watts) has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with average power consumption. We certainly don't decide that a house uses an average of ~30kw simply because it's equipped with a pair of 150A main breakers.
That said, yes, there's no excuse for how much juice these things use in standby mode.
comcast merger will give them to much power not only to cap you and make you pay for going over but to also make Netflix, Roku, Apple and others pay more to get on the fast lane to you.
Don't have cable, fiber or XDSL2 then for get about it. TV on 4g / LTE will eat cap so fast.
I would imagine as more and more "smart" network-enabled devices come on line you're going to see this kind of background power consumption increase.
Not from an end-user functionality perspective but because the devices will be sold cheap with the vendors making money from the trove of in-home data harvested by the device and sold to marketers.
Factor in devices whose functionality is tied to constant cloud connectivity and general crappy software quality that makes no attempt to manage power consumption ("Hey, it's plugged in, what's another 20 watts").
middle of the night is used for push VOD content.
also updates happen at night as well.
24/7 the boxes are getting new guide info as well.
try more like an 3-4 boot time some boxes are less and on cable about 20-30 mins to get guide data back. Also hope that the boxes don't need to update right after power on.
Most of the boxes that have a 500 Watt listing on the box is the maximum combined power of the box with a television plugged into it. Those boxes generally go into standby when the TV is turned off.
This is the same way Light Dimmers are rated. A 600 Watt dimmer does not consume 600 Watts, but can handle a 600 Watt chandilier with 6 100 Watt bulbs.
Check the back of the box. Does it include a place to plug in the TV?
The truth shall set you free!
Verizon FIOS DVR stays fully awake when turned off, so that it can keep "recording" live TV just in case you want to turn it back on again. At least that's a function, worthwhile or not. It also keeps the display hardware hot to show a screensaver on the TV saying "Your FIOS box is off." Since this text keeps drifting around the screen, rather than allowing the display line to simply go dark, a TV left on by mistake (which would have shut itself off on lost input) also stays awake to keep the DVR company. I fully realize the DVR's never going to be completely dead, because it has to wake up when a timer needs processing; but that should be a very low power mode for any time not actively watching or recording.
Yes, but how much of that 24/7 is data really flowing? If the box woke up for 3 to 5 minutes each hour, that would still be a big difference. Instead it's ON all the time!
DirecTV has no VOD unless you have your box connected to the Internet (where it streams from that source).
Firmware & software updates are relatively small, can be sent anytime & queued for processing later--I have no objections to the box waking from sleep by itself in the middle of the night to apply an update that was received earlier in the day. (After all, the updates are sent constantly--e.g. for boxes that were off because of vacations, power failures, etc.)
I don't care if my guide is updated perfectly in the middle of the night during a window that I choose--I'd rather the box be using 1 watt in sleep mode during this time.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Did anybody actually *think* before writing this article?
A cable box drawing "500 watts" would be cherry-red hot.
The rating of "500 watts" on the back is for cable boxes that have an accessory AC outlet, and the rating means that you can plug in a TV or whatnot rated at up to 500 watts. The cable box itself draws a whole lot less, like 15 watts, even less for the newer ones.
Bzzt. The signal is encrypted even for the broadcast channels, so you need to pirate. And you're a bad person if you don't pirate.
I have a (almost) firm "no" answer to using hostile computers in my house. If it's not mine, then it's unwanted. (Currently, phones are still getting away with defying me, but that's not going to last forever.)
If a particular service requires that I use a hostile computer, then I say no to the service; it's a user-unfriendly service.
And if a publisher is only available through hostile services, then they are not seriously participating in the market.
And if a publisher is not participating in the market, then all the reasons for granting them copyright, have been undermined. Their government-granted monopoly serves no purpose, because they don't have a product for sale, so we as a society have no reason to go out of our way to give them the monopoly. You might as well treat 'em as not copyrighed.
And I do. So while we all realize that Game of Thrones is essentially not copyrighted, that also applies to broadcast channels in any area with bad antenna reception. If the [former] rightsholders were serious, they would demand that the carrier not be allowed to apply DRM. That would be a contract violation and the studios would sue the cable companies and put an end to it.
Since that's not happening, we can conclude that the former rightsholders are voluntarily opting out of the market.
This is all basic simple ethics. And if everyone would be this ethical, that would be the end of DRM. We could have good PVRs like we did a decade ago, we could have thriving IP industries, and we could have a bunch of not-frustrated people walking around.
And I guess part of the frustration these people are feeling, is that their energy bills are too high. I know that all DRM-compatible PVRs are truly awful from a user-interface perspective (I almost died laughing when I was visiting someone's house and saw them scrolling through an unsorted show list; apparently their media machine pre-dated the 1940s when people learned that computers can be used to alphabetize things), but I didn't know about the hardware being this shitty. Yet once you think about it, it's hardly surprising. Why should the hardware be any good? It's not like you picked out the parts like you do when you're building an HTPC. It's not like there was any sort of natural market force selection. You'd expect it to have all the virtues of the stuff coming out of a Soviet production line.
Cancel your DRMed TV, and pirate. Just fucking do it. You'll get to use better hardware and overall have a way better experience. You'll look look back on the DRM days with DISBELIEF that you were tolerating that bullshit. Your wife will be happier. You'll be happier. You'll spend less money per month (or at least until the publishers open for business). You'll have vastly more content diversity. Everything just gets right and "high tech" like, all the old promises fulfilled (or re-fulfilled, in some cases).
You should never, ever allow content to directly influence your hardware. That's totally crazy and it's something you normally would never consider. Stop treating video as some strange arbitrary ethical exception. There's nothing exceptional about it, at all. GET BACK TO NORMAL.
Some VOD stuff is pushed and does not need to be connected to the Internet to work. Mainly the PPV movies and some premium channels VOD.
Mine takes 2.1-3kW easy. I bet hers uses low temperatures and is made of plastic. She may live in a trailer park as well. On the subject, switchable plugs work fine to reduce standby consumption.
The article uses energy and electricity to mean the same thing. So if you have a gas water heater, then it won't be in the same bucket as the box.
I do have a 50 gallon electric water heater, and its definitely a distant third in electricity consumption, behind the HVAC and the gaming computers (only if we put both computers and count them as one thing though)
The laundry machines are a joke, especially if you have a gas dryer. In summer, my stove/oven + dryer together cost me 6 bucks a month to run.
Without premium channels, analog cable worked just fine without boxes.
The cable companies used the Digital TV transition to make them required.
There was no technical reason to do this.
QAM tv's worked just fine on cable until the local channels recently got encrypted.
They could have used the over the air modulation scheme instead of QAM.
It was a business reason.
1) The can collect for each TV.
2) There is now a box there to make it easier to add a premium channel.
3) The fancy boxes are always there to try to sell you a pay per view.
4) It puts them is a good spot to own the media gateway for the house.
The boxes are not there to make the customer's experience better.
With competition, they would not exist.
But they do.
Well, at least Internet is going to provide some competition.
Oh wait, they collect for that as well.
Without competition this is only going to get worse.
Regulation seems unlikely to help. (Except perhaps something ofcom-like?)
Municipal fiber supporting a competitive service provider ecosystem seems a good choice.
Just because the article is sloppy and thinks gas doesn't count as energy doesn't mean I'm going to make the same mistake. Drying laundry takes a lot of energy, as does heating the water if you wash with warm or hot. (I don't care that gas is cheaper; energy is energy.)
Do you really game so much that your gaming computers take up more juice than the water heater? If they were running full-tilt 24x7 I could certainly conceive of this, but they don't. And when a water heater is cycling on, that sucker is drawing multiple kW. (And when I was referring to food, I was mostly thinking of the fridge; unless you cook a LOT, cooking doesn't use up that much energy.)
In any case, all that is going to dwarf a dinky little cable box, no matter how badly designed.
Any kind of sleeping router would need to respond to incoming calls.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I've got FIOS, screwy Verizon... Periodically they update their firmware, which is mostly just to reset the sleep timer back on. As in it turns off in the middle of your movie. Real pain in the ass if you're using MythTV.
However, firmware updates also lock up the system for a few minutes. You can watch whatever channel it was previously set to, but you can't change channels. If you were watching HBO last night, and you wanted to check the weather this morning, well you may have to answer questions from the kiddies about why that man and woman are wrestling naked and agreeing so much.
I've learned to keep a second remote handy to quick-kill the TV. I may not be able to alter the set-top-box, but I can pull the plug on the TV!
I think what caught peoples' eye, was the part about the cable box using a 500W power supply. (That is hard for me to believe; makes me wonder if it was just a tag on a heavy gauge power cord or something.) You can't look at that number and not at least raise your eyebrows, can you? Yes, article goes on to say the machinery really only uses 35W and IMHO that's pretty decent (I still have some machines that use more than that). But it's beatable and just becomes more beatable every year.
Extrapolate. Locking yourself into proprietary hardware has always been a long-term loser in tech (I get to say this as a former Amiga user), and cable TV and the abandonment of standards like QAM means those services are moving toward more lock-in, rather than less. Yet look at the trends on the other side, and how awesome a Haswell-based HTPC is and how much better a Broadwell will be. You've got this do-things-smart vs do-things-stupid graph where lines have opposite-signed slopes: a big X where the X is now so clearly left of 2014 (even if we disagree about exactly when it happened), and time just marches onward into higher contrast.
And this is just the wattage, not even getting into all the other advantages of not using their shitty software. Cutting the cord is already a no-brainer when you look at the big picture (I think live sports fans are the only exception remaining?); TFA is about how it's starting to make even more sense in new ways, such as energy bills.
It's no wonder the cable company needs to buy so much government; with their current approach there's no way they could survive in a free market. I wonder how long until their non-customers are going to have to start paying subsidies to them through our water bills or something else that can't be reasonably opted out of.
As long as such wastage doesn't even raise an eyebrow, it seeps energy prices could well go up.
I mean even those seemingly spectacular low limits like "1 Watt in standby" are ridiculously high.Standby should be in the ballpark of 'couple of milliwatts!
The new STB which replaces the big grey monstrosity cannot be turned off via the remote control. You can only turn it off by pushing the button on the front.
From what I understand the new X1 box is just a micro PC with a PCcard in it.
If a consumer communications provider requires their equipment be used, that equipment should meet increasingly stringent energy consumption requirements. What's good for the water heater and refrigerator is good for the DVR / cable box (AND the cable phone modem, which runs much hotter than the combo cable / router / wireless modem!).
GCI Moto Cable DVR boxes in Alaska use around $100/yr @ the current rate of about 20c/kWh. I emailed their support about it asking if they offered a less power hungry unit. I never got a reply.
Even with the system in "standby" it still used the same amount of power and produced just as much heat.
I like to put my TV and any other non essential things on a switch so if the TV isnt being watched I cut their mains power with one of those power strips that has a switch, including game consoles, audio equipment, dvd players etc. Problem with butting the the cable box is a) you'd missing scheduled recordings b) it takes some time for the unit to sync up the program schedules again.
Even after leaving the cable box "off" for a whole day, the thing still feels hot to the touch.
I guess it is just a 35 watt heater now.
There are a couple issues with any sort of low-power mode on a dvr/shared box system.
1) User adjustable times would create a customer service nightmare. All of these companies try desperately to avoid CS phone time as much as possible and having to deal with 'why didnt such and such record' due to some user cock up of a deep sleep time would add to the headache
2) It has to download guide updates, software updates, vod(which is not internet only despite what people around here may think, sat providers download full movies to partitions on your hdd)
3)This is besides any issues with the new ones that provide a bunch of networked functionality. What if you have a central box with thin clients and a thin client turns on, now you have to wake up your main box in order to use a tuner, which then causes all sorts of delays as you bring up tuners, hdd, etc. What if you have a user set a remote recording from a website, now you have to wake up the stb, set the recording, re-arrange its deep sleep patterns, etc.
4) Energy star when it comes to these boxes does mean something depending on the level of certification. Some require that you disable unused outputs, unused tuners, etc etc, which lead to power savings. You have to be under a certain wattage when in 'use', and another level while in whatever your box considers 'standby'
I have basic cable so I can plug right into my TV. However with digital TV being common why arn't more TV's handling it so you don't need the cable box.
My TV includes a digital tuner so I can plug my basic digital cable service directly into the TV using the coax cable coming out of the wall, no cable box necessary. These unencrypted channels include all the basic standard definition channels offered by my cable company not just the handful of local terrestrial broadcast channels.
I actually split the coax and have one output go directly into the TV and one into the cable box. The cable company's DVR only has two receivers, on rare occasions I have two shows recording and I switch the TV to the direct input (the TV's receiver) and watch a third show live.
The subject of the previous post should have been "Energy >= Electricity"
Why does a cable box need to use upto 500 W?
They don't. RTFS, that was taken off the face plate on the device. Face plates are always conservative (though this takes it to a whole new level) about power draw. Plug that thing into a watt meter and I'd be surprised if it used more than 15 or 20 watts when running full bore, never mind in standby mode. One might argue that 20 watts is a lot (and it is, my TiVo uses <10) but it's a lot less than 500.
Remember the second law. Energy can't just disappear. A cable box drawing 500 watts would need to dissipate 500 joules of heat energy per second. That's an hourly total of 1.8 megajoules or 1,706 BTU. For point of comparison, a 1500 watt 120V space heater tops out at about 5,200 BTU/hr. Where do you think those 1,700 BTUs are going? Think about how many cable boxes are in tightly confined entertainment centers with little to no ventilation. The cable box would melt down in short order in such an environment if it was truly using that much energy. High end gaming machines and servers usually top out about 200-300 watts of sustained draw and they need active cooling to deal with the waste heat.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
My Comcast cable box consumes 20 watts when on, and 20 watts when off (measured with a wattmeter). I never bother to turn them off anymore.
Cable and satellite receivers have always been poorly designed, slower than molasses, hot-running piles of shit with UI design worse than a PC RPG ported to an NES and more bugs than the Amazon. Anyone have any ideas why this is? With any other consumer electronic device people would rage spike it into the pavement, but for cable boxes it's somehow okay.
I recently cancelled Dish Network for blacking out half the Braves games (in Atlanta, no less) and sent their shit-box back to them. Netflix, TPB and Linux HTPC's all the way, baby.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
The problem is simple:
1) Old boxes just won't die.
2) Cable companies don't want to replace equipment unless they absolutely have to.
Comcast still supports the old VCR-sized, power guzzling GeneralInstruments/Motorola cable boxes that they gave out when digital cable just started. These fuckers are huge, heavy, consume ridiculous amounts of energy and spew out tons of heat.
I had one for a few years in the early 00s until I got rid of cable.
They don't even support HD, they're THAT old. Yet there's still millions of them out there, mostly owned by people who don't care about HD, and they won't be replaced until they die or the cable company stops supporting them, which is likely to be not until they do die. Good luck with that.
500 watts includes 485 watts available thru outlet on rear of STB. Do you think a cable box has enough fans waste 500 watts? That rating must be for box plus whatever is plugged to 120 VAC outlet on box.
I too dislike boxes that waste power 24-7, such as Dishnetworks dual input, dual output recorder - tuner that is always hot to touch, even when "OFF". Even so, Cheryl Williamsen is a green fool.
The literature says that my roku box consumes less than 4 watts while streaming HD. Just sayin'... It always seemed cool to the touch.
This thread has been very interesting. I hadn't realized how many people were still using all those old blazing hot cable boxes. I remember them well, but for some reason I thought they were all gone now. I guess that was naive.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
TFA seems to be intentionally designed to mislead the reader.
Electricity demand is growing far more slowly today, thanks to conservation over the last decade. But total use is still projected to grow 29% by 2040, according to the Energy Department
The reality is per-capita energy utilization has been *decreasing* year over year.. reader wouldn't know it by carefully cherry picked facts.
I should add making power utilization predictions for the year 2040 is a futile exercise.
Federal standards on refrigerators and televisions have driven down their energy use by 75%, even while the retail prices have dropped
Really? What about availability of technology and desire to reduce bill of materials? Did switched mode supplies catch on because they are more efficient or because they cost a lot less than copper they displace? What about integrated circuits? Was it government regulation that drove process improvements directly responsible for power efficiency gains or the desire to reduce per component cost?
What regulation was responsible for driving the invention of display panels needed to replace CRT?
While I think regulation in the form of consumer awareness is helpful most often regulatory pressure only brings up the rear of the pack rather than leading with standards necessitating or otherwise driving innovation.
I think overall point that efficiency is being left on the table in consumer electronics domains is a valid concern worthy of focus yet even if solved completely it won't have much of an impact in terms of overall consumption.
http://xkcd.com/1299/
And make these boxes unnecessary
Given how much processing power TV have these days, they could've easily made usb drives with the encryption keys and allows the tvs to do the same job that the boxes do now. But that just wouldn't be profitable. It's nice to see what greed and lack of competition produce.
Actually, clothes driers are the 2nd largest energy users after AC.
Sooo.,., how many light bulbs are powered by YOUR set top box?
I mean, your tv set is not powered by the box in any way, at least, i have never seen such a construction. It's still very very silly that it's rated so high.
Also, cable boxes are not light dimmers..
As with all things cable... I'm stuck with what they give me and I can't upgrade to a better box unless mine breaks. I have Charter and I'm using the same Scientific Atlanta cable box I had when first signed up for their HD service and DVR back in 2004.... yup 10 years.
If it did break, I don't know if they'd just pull another one from the warehouse to give me but otherwise there's no way to upgrade.
It is old and runs warm and I'm sure it's an energy hog. It's 10 years behind on any of the components inside the thing, especially the hard drive ... which is very small if you want to record shows in HD.
I was only recently that the on-board software (copyrighted in 2008) gives you the option to spin down the hard drive in the machine when the cable box is off.
I doubt voluntary industry guidelines will do anything if they don't actually have to upgrade existing boxes...
A cable box cannot possibly consume 500W. In fact, even in the abstract, a few sentences later, the author says that a box she evaluated uses 35W. Whatever "rating" our lady architect is reading evidently does not refer to power consumption of the box itself. Perhaps a limit on pass-throughs?
And I find it hard to believe that a cable box, even if left on 24 hours a day, would consume more power than, say, a refrigerator or hot-water heater. It's not hard to burn 300 gallons of oil a month if you live in the Northern one-third of the U.S.
Doesn't anybody at Slashdot even RTFA before accepting a posting??
So (inadvertently) funny that it bears repeating:: ",,, she had no idea how much power they consumed until recently, when she saw a rating on the back for as much as 500 watts — about the same as a washing machine. A set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power, ..."
What maroons.
Like TiVo? I wonder if making your own HTPCs with cable cards would better. I think you lose features like ondemand though. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I got rid of cable (well, Dish Network) a few years ago. Wasn't worth the money I was paying for it. I find PLENTY to watch on the 19 channels I get for FREE with my outdoor antenna. However, I DO remember the Dish Network receiver getting hot enough you could probably fry an egg on the darn thing!
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
Here around (european country) I see an ever lower trend:
Things move to the cloud.
"Set-top box" are nothing more than a glorified network stream viewer.
channels are simply DVB-IPTV over a multicast connection.
(You can actually watch the same channels on your laptop by pointing VLC to the correct rtp:// address)
(and in fact, you can download an iOS / Android App that does exactly that)
"DVR"... are just an extra functionality on the server.
Servers keep a backup of the last 7 days worth of data streams.
Whenever you want to rewatch a previous show (a type of premium service), pause a currently watch show, etc. there's no actual recording to a HD (the boxes don't have a disk by default).
The STB simply opens a private unicast stream from the backup.
"Recording show for a longer time than a week" is either a paid option (a premium service where the server can keep a copy of some stream longer than 7 days) or a paid option (as in, you pay for some USB attached storage and get to keep your own copy)
Beside for the storage (which is paid by the various "playback" premium options) there isn't much requirement (streams are multi-cast, so no big stress on the bandwith. The unicast playbacks are an option and are paid-for)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I can't afford a $70 a month unlimited data cell phone bill plan though.
So the solution would be to use as much Wifi as possible.
(Though the problem would be that not all wifi routers are multi-cast compatible)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
As a couple of the other commenters have said, the math doesn't work out. I was inspired to write a full takedown on the column on my blog.
http://duncanpredicts.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/no-cable-tv-boxes-are-not-the-2nd-biggest-energy-users-in-many-homes/
Hope it helps. To be clear: nothing wrong with reducing the standby power on set top boxes. But it won't save the world as fast as you might think!
Duncan Stewart