Cable Boxes and DVRs Use More Power Than Refrigerators

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
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Wow, just Wow….I never even thought of the power consumption of cable boxes and DVR’s, just sitting there doing seemingly nothing. The luxury of being ready to record your favorite shows is actually costing your household a fair chunk of change.

Although a DVR could be made to spin down the drive and underclock the processor when not in use, a big chunk of power will still be consumed.
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MajorDomo said:
Wow, just Wow….I never even thought of the power consumption of cable boxes and DVR’s, just sitting there doing seemingly nothing. The luxury of being ready to record your favorite shows is actually costing your household a fair chunk of change.
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Its essentially a computer that is running 24/7. They're also built as cheaply as possible, not to conserve power.
 
Think that's a good enough reason to throw away those cable boxes, and go back to hooking up cable straight to our TV? Who enjoys paying a rental fee for a cable box? Especially since our TVs can already do this, as long as they take away the encryption.

This is where the government should step in, and do something about it
 
I have neither of those. :p My HTPC which can wake itself up uses only 5W in standby, which is around 44KW-Hr per year ($5 at my electricity rates).

I want that 60W desktop computer in the chart (60W x 8 hours/day x 365 days/year = 175KW-Hr/year) since it doesn't seem to need a monitor. ;)
 
I was thinking the same thing about this article. Its obvious, ever picked one up? They are huge power consuming bricks that offer zero power save features. Nothing is, even like TV's which still drain a ton.

I dont even know why energy star tries because no one knows what it means. Leave it up to some people in congress to neuter EVERY consumer protection / conservation project out there. I'm not even talking about the controversial ones!
 
Even my little old basic digital cable box, the size of a Discman/etc, got hot while running. I turned it off when not in use, but it would still stay warm. The HD PVR I bought my parents gets turned off when not in use, haven't felt it to see how warm it gets while on or off though.
 
Yet another reason to cut the cord? Oh yeah...

Working on building a Fusion HTPC right now to replace the DVR and it looks like this might be a side-benefit for us. No more paying for electricity for our HR22. Sure the HTPC draws 40W when idle but sleep is going to be ~5W and that's cheap.
 
Not terribly surprising, especially when you consider that cable and satellite companies try not to replace their stock of older inefficient electronics until they wear out. I know my house has three 2003-2004 era cable boxes and DVRs, even though I signed up with the provider just 6 months ago. The basic no-frills cable box puts out so much heat that a few hours of use was enough to overheat a Wii I set on top of it to save shelf space. And in another room I can hear the hard drive of the DVR spin up about once every 15 minutes when not in use, even when nothing is scheduled for recording.
 
interesting... im using direct tvs hd dvr right now, warm to the touch, ill have to measure its power draw! Of couse here in phoenix thats pennies compared to the A/C costs....
 
The power consumption the chart gives for the HD set top box is about 20W and about 31W for the HD DVR. That's about $45 per year in power costs at $0.10/KW-Hr. Is less than $4/month really that much compared to your cable bill? :p
 
SamuraiInBlack said:
After reading this I just unplugged mine.
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Yeah it's too bad with the direcTv boxes when you turn them back on they take like 10 minutes to get ready. I'm sorry I want to watch TV in a pinch damnit.

Oh well, I got 3.26kW of solar panels on my roof to off set my TV :D

Of course my 400 gallons of tropic reef aquarium doesn't makes the TV power look like a tiny spark :D
 
I actually got rid of my digital cable box (back when I had cable) because it ran too hot. I knew it had to be sucking down quite a bit of power to get that hot. You really start to notice these things when you don't live in a cold climate or use air conditioning. Now if only I could find a big computer monitor that doesn't get boiling hot...
 
The numbers in this article are wrong. They put an HD-DVR at 50W when in reality my Motorola box is around 28W. So in reality my HD-DVR only uses about 60% of the power of my (Energy Star) refrigerator.

It's still stupid that these boxes require so much power. My DVR never spins down the HDD and it uses a 7200rpm drive (rather than a slower "green" drive which would be more than sufficient). And even if you assume ~8W for the HDD, that's still 20W for the rest of the box which is more than most Atom systems. There's no reason that an entire DVR shouldn't be sub-15W including disk, and less when the system is inactive.
 
Ashbringer said:
Think that's a good enough reason to throw away those cable boxes, and go back to hooking up cable straight to our TV? Who enjoys paying a rental fee for a cable box? Especially since our TVs can already do this, as long as they take away the encryption.

This is where the government should step in, and do something about it
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It isn't a cable box along that they are talking about. it is any type of set top DVR. In order for you to go back to watch something before you "turned it on" it is recording / buffering 24/7. That means that it is running constantly even if you aren't actually watching anything. If you just have a normal non DVR cable box / sat box then you don't have that issue. Might be the same same DVR that doesn't do time shift like that, it could probably go to sleep and only wake up when needed.
 
pxc said:
The power consumption the chart gives for the HD set top box is about 20W and about 31W for the HD DVR. That's about $45 per year in power costs at $0.10/KW-Hr. Is less than $4/month really that much compared to your cable bill? :p
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nope, I just never wondered how much power these things sucked. This is interesting as its the smallest device in my cabinet but it ends up using more power per month then my HTPC with a 4850e in it.
 
While there is a point to be made about the inefficiency of these boxes, the article does point out that these numbers are somewhat exaggerated:

Initially you might assume that the main culprit is the hard drive spinning in the device, but according to the article, it only accounts for an additional 104 kilowatt-hours a year; a normal HD set-top box generates 171 kilowatt-hours a year compared to 275 kilowatt-hours a year for an HD DVR.
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They are displaying the sum of both a HD STB and a HD DVR together. While they numbers are still quite high, they certainly aren't refrigerator-level.
 
Gotta love content farms.

I mean wtf do they think its going to do, just magically turn off yet record the shows you want?

Sure they could be more power efficient but considering these are cheap devices that are probably stuffed in the hottest hole by the consumer, companies dont care.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Yeah it's too bad with the direcTv boxes when you turn them back on they take like 10 minutes to get ready. I'm sorry I want to watch TV in a pinch damnit.

Oh well, I got 3.26kW of solar panels on my roof to off set my TV :D

Of course my 400 gallons of tropic reef aquarium doesn't makes the TV power look like a tiny spark :D
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For me its a non-issue. I don't even watch TV most of the time anyway. I prefer my instant netflix anyway.
 
You can hear it too.

EVERY night when I go to bed I unplug the power strip that connects my DVR, TV, gaming systems, and blu ray player.
 
pxc said:
The power consumption the chart gives for the HD set top box is about 20W and about 31W for the HD DVR. That's about $45 per year in power costs at $0.10/KW-Hr. Is less than $4/month really that much compared to your cable bill? :p
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I think the point is that it's a complete waste. These things have less processing power then a modern smartphone, but use like three orders of magnitude the energy.
 
Have 2 Tivo HDs, hooked em up to a kill-a-watt and they draw 38W. My Old Comcast HD DVR drew 29-31. Wish the Tivos were greener but oh well.

Family of 3, single family home. Last utility bill was 387Kwh for the month (12.5Kwh day), not good enough for tree-hugger status, but I think not too bad? That's with an [H] computer too!
 
I plugged in our refrigerator to a power meter and i got 0 watts (The lightbulb was burned out). It does use 160w when the compressor is actually running tho, but that's not a constant. My PC uses more power than that.

I've tried running a few games tho, and the PC never went over 220w. So i guess my 500w SLI certified PSU is gonna last me a few more years (and a few more rigs)
 
doesn't surprise me, the Scientific Atlanta cable box (now Cisco I guess) that I have has always been a delitirious piece of shit. It can't seem to do anything right.

I wonder though if me turning off the power (it makes a little "click" when I do) when I am not using it helps at all. Sure it it is still on because the time is still showing, and it turns on to record, it almost seems as if having a power on and off function is useless, but I imagine that conserves some energy.
 
Anyone have experience with these? Seems like a good setup, if it actually does what it says it does.
 
spincut said:
doesn't surprise me, the Scientific Atlanta cable box (now Cisco I guess) that I have has always been a delitirious piece of shit. It can't seem to do anything right.

I wonder though if me turning off the power (it makes a little "click" when I do) when I am not using it helps at all. Sure it it is still on because the time is still showing, and it turns on to record, it almost seems as if having a power on and off function is useless, but I imagine that conserves some energy.
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Have you ever unplugged and plugged back in one of those things? It takes literally 5 minutes before you can watch TV. This is with both FIOS and Cablevision boxes.
 
Sly said:
I plugged in our refrigerator to a power meter and i got 0 watts (The lightbulb was burned out). It does use 160w when the compressor is actually running tho, but that's not a constant. My PC uses more power than that.
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well the fridge depends upon many factors. how often you open it, how warm the room is in comparison, how warm food is that you put into it. If they simply plugged a fridge in and took a days average that's going to be a poor averaging of power over a whole year.

Does make me wonder though, when I actually press the power button and the LEDs turn off on my DVR what exactly gets turned off, just the lights? maybe the imagine processing?
 
infect0 said:
Gotta love content farms.

I mean wtf do they think its going to do, just magically turn off yet record the shows you want?

Sure they could be more power efficient but considering these are cheap devices that are probably stuffed in the hottest hole by the consumer, companies dont care.
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my computer can go to sleep, spin down the hard drive and wake up when it needs to record then go back to sleep. so why can't the DVR. of course that won't allow for time lapse then.

SamuraiInBlack said:
For me its a non-issue. I don't even watch TV most of the time anyway. I prefer my instant netflix anyway.
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Phoenix333 said:
People still watch TV? Why?
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I still watch a mix of tv and netflix. not all shows are on netflix or online in any type of a reasonable time if at all. 2nd season of V was never online. I also almost always forgot about it and missed most of the season. While i think that netflix and online viewing is ok for some stuff, it still isn't there for everything just yet.

spincut said:
doesn't surprise me, the Scientific Atlanta cable box (now Cisco I guess) that I have has always been a delitirious piece of shit. It can't seem to do anything right.

I wonder though if me turning off the power (it makes a little "click" when I do) when I am not using it helps at all. Sure it it is still on because the time is still showing, and it turns on to record, it almost seems as if having a power on and off function is useless, but I imagine that conserves some energy.
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Cisco's set top boxes are just shit, that is just the problem there. From what i heard they dropped out of the settop box market as they couldn't get anything to work right.
 
Zok said:
They are displaying the sum of both a HD STB and a HD DVR together. While they numbers are still quite high, they certainly aren't refrigerator-level.
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Yeah, I'm not sure why they did that. Those two boxes are never used together, so why combine them?
 
Has anyone actually put a power meter on the set top box?

Also, does anyone really buy any of that greenhouse gas bs anyway? (If so, you are either stupid or ignorant.)
 
Phoenix333 said:
People still watch TV? Why?
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It would be more convenient and it would require less power if the networks simply made everything available for download. What's the point of schedules when everyone just records and saves most shows for later...

Personally I rarely watch TV any more. I have everything hooked up to power strips with on/off switches. The TV and associated equipment is powered on maybe 30 minutes a week.
 
Phoenix333 said:
People still watch TV? Why?
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People still watch TV?
People still watch DVDs?
People still buy retail games?
People still use XP?
etc...

If you're one of the people that use any of these sayings, or ones like them I'll let you in on a little secret.
You are not clever or funny and no one thinks you're on the cutting edge of technology because you use alternatives.

If you have to ask questions like these It just means you're naive.
 
BBA said:
Also, does anyone really buy any of that greenhouse gas bs anyway? (If so, you are either stupid or ignorant.)
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I know right. It's all a conspiracy by the lieberal media and ivory tower academics. Those evilutionists just want to tax and spend away our freedoms and guns!!
 
brb, gonna set up a coal fired generator to run a cluster of DVR boxes to record Foxnews 24/7. That'll show those climatologists!
 
Phoenix333 said:
People still watch TV? Why?
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Because people like you who think there is nothing good on TV are wrong.

Sure, not everything on TV is good, but there are good shows out there.

And sports. Because I watch sports...like a man.
 
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