DVRs, Cable Boxes Top List of Home Energy Hogs 324
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by
timothy
from the devil-will-find-work-for-idle-volts dept.
from the devil-will-find-work-for-idle-volts dept.
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."
How about heating and airconditioning? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do STBs really use more energy than things which push heat around?
Re:How about heating and airconditioning? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How about heating and airconditioning? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Is it any more inefficient than using a fleet of trucks to store that something in peoples' homes and burn it there, i.e. oil?
Re:Low power usage is easy (Score:4, Interesting)
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.