A study says your DVR and cable box draws more power than your fridge or air conditioner
Posted 07.01.2011 at 10:26 am
23 Comments
Comcast HD/DVR Box
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A recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) made headlines when it revealed that the biggest energy drain in your house likely isn't the fridge, air conditioner, or heater--it is, unbelievably, the TV set-top box. These ridiculously energy-inefficient boxes, typically provided by your cable company, have received little scrutiny until now, which means the cable companies have had little reason to embrace readily available methods to decrease their energy use. We've put together a list of the best and worst existing set-top boxes, so you can at least know what you're getting.
First, some background. How could that little innocent cable box that provides so many hours of Monk reruns actually use more energy than a giant refrigerator? The problem is that modern DVRs and other set-top boxes aren't regular one-function appliances; they're just specialized computers, with a different exterior. They house energy-sucking hard drives, modern processors, HD video cards, and all kinds of other components you'd find in a regular computer. Except when you're not using a computer, you shut it down (at least, we hope you do). Not so for set-top boxes.
The NRDC found that "Today’s set-top boxes operate at near full power even when the consumer is neither watching nor recording a show," and that set-top boxes are only in use about a third of the time they're running. It raises the question: Why don't people just shut down their boxes when not in use? The answer is in two parts: First, they don't realize they should, and second, set-top boxes take awhile to start up--like a computer (which is what they are), rather than the instant-on of a TV. Customers are not accustomed to waiting a few minutes for their TV to be available, and so leave the boxes on all the time, which in turn means the cable providers don't have any motivation to reduce startup time, let alone make them more efficient.
The thing is, there are all kinds of options available to manufacturers that can reduce the energy use of these boxes. There could be a "stand-by" or "sleep" mode, often seen in some set-top boxes in Europe, that greatly reduce energy use when the box is inactive. Even odder, most American boxes don't even have an actual "off" button--pressing the button labeled "off" will merely dim the clock in many cases. The only way to actually stop these set-top boxes from draining energy and raising your electric bill is to yank the plug out of the wall--cathartic, maybe, but not very intuitive.
To be fair, cable boxes aren't whirring away, raising your electricity bill, for no reason. The benefit, at least for DVRS, of being always on is the buffer--a DVR records constantly, usually an hour of footage from whatever channel you're watching, erasing as it goes so only the immediately previous hour is recorded. That's why you can arrive late for Jeopardy! (not that we recommend being so cavalier about Jeopardy!) and rewind it to the beginning of the episode so you can catch the easy questions in Single Jeopardy. If the DVR was in a deep sleep mode, with the hard drives spun down, it wouldn't be able to maintain its buffer 24/7. But there are still ways around it--you could have it automatically go to a deep sleep during hours when you're at work and unlikely to need that buffer, for example.
Some of the cable companies surveyed promised to deliver more energy-efficient set-top boxes in the future, but many noted that without public acknowledgment or interest, there was no real motivation to spend money on less energy-hungry, more efficient hardware. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody cares that it's raising everyone's electric bill, why make a more efficient tree? (That analogy may not be as apt as it sounded in my head.)
We dug through the NRDC's data and pulled out the best and worst options for most of the major cable companies. The NRDC didn't bother with little regional carriers, in the interest of keeping the survey from being completely unmanageable, but most Americans subscribe to one of these companies--and this is information they should have.
If You Have Comcast
In terms of energy efficiency, Comcast comes out as the lesser of several evils, but not by much. Comcast's most energy-efficient boxes tend to be slightly more efficient than their equivalents at Verizon, Time Warner, and the satellite companies, and they also offer more choices in terms of hardware. The NRDC's data picks the Motorola DCH70 as the best standard-def box (sucking down 10W while active, and 10W while on standby), the Pace RNG110 as the best high-def box (13W active, 12W standby), and the Motorola DCX3400 as the best HD/DVR (29W active, 28W standby).
I spoke to a Comcast representative who told me that typically, the company installs whichever box they want, but that if you request a specific box that they have in stock, they'll happily install that one for you. They won't order you a box from elsewhere, and this kind of hardware rotates in and out of availability fairly quickly, but at least you might have the option to choose.
If You Have Verizon FiOS
Verizon's most efficient boxes are just okay, while its least efficient are some of the worst of any surveyed. Even worse, Verizon gives the customer absolutely no option about which box they get--you can't request a specific box at any point. That doesn't matter too much for the non-DVR boxes, as the NRDC's findings only turned up one standard-def and one high-def box, but there's a big gap in efficiency between the company's best and worst DVRs. The most efficient is Motorola's QIP7216, at an unremarkably 29W active and 28W standby, but the older Motorola QIP6416 clocks in at a lousy 36W active and 35W standby.
If You Have Time Warner
Time Warner has a smaller selection of set-top boxes than either Verizon or Comcast, with only one averagely (in)efficient DVR and one startlingly inefficient standard-def box. For a high-def, non-DVR box, the Cisco Explorer 4250HDC is the most efficient, at 19W active and 18W standby, but Time Warner told me that that's an older box that might be tough to find. The Time Warner rep was (surprisingly, given the company's lousy reputation here in New York) quite helpful, and offered to try to track down one of the 4250HDCs if that was what I wanted.
If You Have DirecTV
Here we get to the satellite folks. DirecTV's offerings are only slightly less efficient than Comcast's or Verizon's, with the (currently only) standard-def box coming in at 12W active, 9W standby, the best HD box (the DirecTV H24) at 16W active, 15W standby, and the best HD/DVR (the DirecTV HR24) at 31W active, 31W standby. The DVR is pretty lousy, efficiency-wise, but that's nothing compared to the Dish Network's craziness.
If You Have Dish Network
I don't know what is happening inside the Dish Network's DVRs. Given the energy usage, they might well be powering nuclear reactors. The "best" DVR Dish offers, the ViP922, uses 43W while active, and 40W while in standby--but the worst one, the ViP722, uses a ridiculous 55W while active and 52W while in standby.
If You Use The Internet
Many are ditching traditional cable services for online services like Netflix and Hulu, and luckily, there are a whole bunch of gadgets that can play that content (and more) on a TV. They are also invariably more efficient than a cable box, to a startling degree. The Apple TV (reviewed here), which streams Netflix and plays music, movies, and TV from Apple's iTunes store, uses a mere 3W while active and 0.5W while in standby. Roku's XR-HD, which streams Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, and a whole bunch more, uses only 7W while active and another 7W while in standby. The Boxee Box, a curiously shaped media streamer that uses the open-source, ultra-powerful Boxee software, can play Netflix, stream video from other computers on its network, play media from a hard drive or thumb drive plugged into one of its USB ports, and stream from lots of apps (with Hulu hopefully to come soon). It was tested by an Ars Technica commenter whose measurements probably differ from the NRDC's, but roughly estimates that it uses 13W while active and 13W while in standby.
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I have Verizon FIOS and they are beginning a "slow rollout" of a new HD DVR set top box. I signed up for the advanced release on their website, and soon received an email allowing me to upgrade the box for a fee.
This is not available for all Verizon FIOS customers apparently but their new box is not mentioned here. I received the box yesterday and haven't set it up yet so I'm not sure about software but I know that the hard drive on the box is significantly larger, allowing up to 80 hours of HD content (rather than the 20 on the current model).
It would be interesting to know whether or not the new box they are about to release is any more energy efficient. It is made by Cisco, not Motorola.
Where are the relevant power draw numbers relating to ACs or fridges?
So worst case 30 Watts 24 hours a day is 720 watt hours. That's about what my air conditioner uses in 15 minutes.
Can't PopScience find writers that finished grade 3 arithmetic.
Your set top box uses more power than your air conditioner? How could you even write that and have it make sense in your mind? Does the writer not possess any common sense whatsoever?
My window AC unit uses 1400 watts, which means it consumes over 48 times as much power as my Comcast cable box.
Are these articles outsourced?
I subscribe to CableVision on Long Island NY. I have an "IO" box which sits on the top of the TV
Without the box I would have to buy a device to get only the basic channels. With the box I can get "Family Cable" which is a level of service that they offer abd the programming is suitable.
Then TV is in the bedroom along with "the box."
All night long the box is making noise. I hear a relay click and the hard drive begins spinning for at least 15-20 minutes. The another "click" and the drive stops. Fifteen minutes later the relay clicks again and the hard drive begins spinning again. This goes on every night, all night long. I would imagine that it happens also throughout the day time hours but for 5 days each week I'm not here during those hours and so I cannot verify it. Even if I were to be home during the day we would be out somewhere and not spending our day time hours in the bedroom watching the tube.
I would imagine that the electricity bill is affected by this evil box. But without it TV is not worth anything here!
So what do we do?
@sethdayal: OK, let's use your math.
720 WHr/day x 365 days = 262.8 KWHr/year
However, an air conditioner does not run 24 hrs/day, nor does it run 365 days/year. In fact, unless you live in Arizona or another extremely hot climate, the average new A/C unit in a reasonably energy efficient house will only run for about 1 hr/day total and, at most, for only about 90 days/year. So...
720 W x 4 = 2.88 KWHr/day
2.88 KWHr/day x 90 days = 259.2 KWHr/year
Well, what do you know...
Must be one of those little "green" men who want everyone in America to be forced to buy a new "green energy" cable box. Perhaps one that has an array of solar panels that connect to it instead of an AC cord. This has got to be one of the dumbest articles I've come across from a "science" publication in quite some time. The other was that Al Gore invented the Internet, and everyone else's jet emits harmful CO2 gas but not his! Next we'll have to collect cow dung to process in our home power conversion units to justify the power we're utilizing on our cable boxes.
Well a 1986 fridge uses 1400 kWh, a 'modern' one about 350 kWh a year. Lets use 30w for the set to box. So 30w times 8760 hrs a year is 262.8 kWh a year.
So the writer repeating the NRDC reported is obviously spreading misinformation.
You need a set top box that uses 39.95 watts, ok 40 watts 24/7 to just beat a 'modern' fridge. btw most people don't have modern, energy efficient fridges.
Winner refrigerator, still the king baby
(lousy 700 kWh/year fridge at a high $.15 /kWh is $105. How many years would that take to payoff a 'modern' EXPENSIVE fridge?)
(savings if the set top boxes lower their wattage, about $10 a YEAR)
Who lets these articles see daylight? and as a 'feature' no less?? I give up...
Ok lets do some more math:
15W running 24h/day for a month: how much does that cost?
0.015kW * (24h * 30d) = 10.8kWh
assuming electricity costs around $0.15
10.8 * 0.15 = $1.62
...or about the cost of a (small) cup of coffee. That's basically almost nothing to worry about, comparatively.
Your full of it. My AC in Colorado runs about 12 hours a day to keep our house cool from Mid-April to Mid-Oct. In Phoenix, our AC ran nearly 10 months of the year for about 18 hours per day. It's on almost all the time it cycles off and on but runs every single hour and about 30% of the time it's on every hour. Your way off on your calculations on total energy consumed by an AC.
Why do you think that the utilities companies want to add super saver switches to AC units? It's because they suck power.
Perhaps if your in a super insulated home -- that's one that uses far thicker than standard R13 walls and R19 ceilings you can get by on less or if you have a smaller than average house (average nationwide is 2300 sq ft).
Get your facts right!
I saw the original article a couple of days ago. They used a figure of 466 KWH/yr for the box vs 415 for some unspecified refreigerator. (Mine is only 2 years old, and a good one, but I doubt that it is that good).
466 KWH amounts to about $50/yr. It could be better, but it's not 'destroying' my electric bill.
I live in MN, and we have relatively short summers. Nevertheless my central AC easily tops my Dish Network receiver. The AC is moderately efficient, and my home is moderately well insulated.
Yes, the boxes could be better, but this is the same sky is falling drivel that they previously posted about TV sets in standby.
Would that somebody would just show the facts in a good summary and let people see what savings were possible where. Instead we have these sizzling exposes and people hooking their Kill a Watt meters to Twitter so that they can show how they save by unplgging their TV. (Hint --it's not that much).
pj1983, either you live in the pole or you just exaggerate your AC power consumption.
I don't know but my comments are being flagged as spam but the "Nike guy" is on every topic peddeling his "...shoes and other sporting goods."
Maybe the webmaster's nephew?
bippidty + bobbity to the power of boo means stop arguing with things you don't understand completely.
This is sensationalism at its finest. I highly doubt that Dan Nosowitz even read the entire report published by the NRDC. My guess is that he had been surfing on the NYT site and came across this juicy headline, then essentially paraphrased it so that he could submit it for publication as his own work. Unfortunately, this made for terrible journalism. If he had read the report, he would have seen that the specifics stated that the "typical" set-top box configuration (which is an HD DVR plus at LEAST one set top box) exceeds the power demand used by an ENERGY STAR COMPLIANT high-energy efficiency refrigerator, not your "typical" non-Energy Star-rated fridge found in millions and millions of households across the U.S. Furthermore, he made no mention of how IPtv (video-over-IP through fiber optic cable like AT&T's U-verse) uses FAR less power than your "regular" co-ax cable box does. In fact, IPtv HD receivers and HD DVR's consum under 10W and under 20W respectively, 33% less than cable boxes and 50% less than satellite, which is no small margin.
Dan Nosowitz should have done some investigative journalism prior to publishing this article. There were no links and/or figures posted for what percentages of the pay-tv market are represented by cable and satellite subscribers and there was no reference to IPtv as it had been in the NRDC report, probably because the figures on power consumption by these units weren't sensationally high, despite the fact that IPtv represents a significant portion of the pay-TV market.
Furthermore, to actually verify what he was reporting, Dan should have done some real-world evaluation of the power consumption of not only set-top boxes, but also that of other appliances to which they were being compared. This would have eliminated, if not only partially, the comments made by the others that power used by set-top boxes is less than that used by other appliances, especially considering the range of speculation about how much power they actually consume (because not all appliances run 24/7 as a set-top box does). Only after adjusting for actual run time can power consumption be compared, but statements can only be generalized because there isn't a "standard" amount of power a older non-Energy Star appliance uses.
Finally, this article offers very little in regard to a solution to the set-top box "destroying" our power bills. The author apparently did no evaluation of his own to determine if there was any credence to what he was publishing. By using something as simple as a Kill-a-watt to determine the cost of usage for several set-top boxes and appliances over a given period of time, he could have demonstrated definitively whether or not his claims were true. Instead, he handed in his assignment without "showing his work", so to speak.
If Popular Science is going to be yet another one of countless news outlets that regurgitates sensational headlines without doing any actual journalistic investigation, then I'm going to seek out a more reliable outlet for news. Furthermore, PopSci should seriously reconsider publishing just anything that is submitted by their authors. The quality of the reporting on this website has been in steady decline for quite some time now and someone there should take a stand against posting garbage such as this article and try to get back to publishing journalism with depth, clarity, and insight.
I forgot one little thing.
You notice the vents all over a set top box? Yeah, they're also like little heaters. Good in winter and may maybe $1 for your a/c to cool it in summer.
All that wasted heat spewwing off of these power hungry devices should be stopped! Congress must pass laws against this waste of.... lol ;D sarcasm too thick?
How about the kWh wasted with this stoopid 'feature' article? Send popsci a bill for the electric used to view this *$%&$#
I use TIVO ... The Premier version is Energy Star Certified ... works with most cable companies cards
Robert1234: Hmmm. I'm calling Dish and demanding they get with it and install a "sleep" mode, and install it NOW. 55 is WAY to much power to be wasting and it's an added expense I don't need. The programs are crap anyway and I'm contemplating killing cable totally anyway. About 50% of the stuff on Dish is commercials and stuff that only an idiot would watch that is just idiotic anyway.
To be fair, Dish's 922 DVR is also a slingbox server. None of the other set top boxes can do that.
The 722 can be used in two rooms, so you could theoretically split that in half and it's 27watts- the same as if you used two set top boxes from other providers.
Still, at 55 watts, who cares? Your PS3 and TV (unless its new) are chugging about 400 watts each. And you probably run audio through a receiver. That's just the entertainment center. Then there's your PC, printer, modem, router, water heater, clothes washer/dryer, lighting, dishwasher, A/C or furnace, etc... There's bigger fish to fry.
DVR and cable box draws more power than fridge or air conditioner seems to me as great tools. I think it's very critical apart for the DirecTV, Dish Network and the Internet users. I appreciate it can reduce the electrical bills. Thanks! ;)
Biggest load of tosh I've ever read. 2 energy saving light-bulbs will on average use more electricity and if you own a kettle, they consume 2 - 3000 watts while switched on so better chuck that out...
What is the point of having electricity running through the house if you're freaking out about something that consumes ~30 watts?
I'd be more worried about which energy provider you get power from than how much a set top box consumes because that would likely save more electricity or cash dependant on whichever is your main concern.
Lol the point of the article is that set-top boxes use more electric when on standby or powered off than the consumer thinks.
"Vampire Appliances" have recently gained national attention.
I'm sure the author didn't intend to piss everyone off here, but you should look at the issue at hand and not the controversial comparison to AC units. In some places they are only needed to run for a few short hours while others they are needed to run longer. Of course there will be a cost difference.
Anyway.. Companies like Apple (sorry to the haters) have an opportunity to come into the market and re-invent the set-top box. The only thing holding them back are these ridiculous cable companies who over charge and under deliver.
I want to own my own set-top box with my own 3rd party GUI that works, not this FIOS or Comcast crap that freezes and makes me want to burn my house to the ground trying to find out what channel the game is on.
Wow. This article is retarded. End of story. I'd say this is a credibility-- for you.
I would agree that merely leaving them on does use power, and the power measurements of the boxes are fairly accurate. But you neither supported your claims or provided reason to believe that this is actually a major concern. To make up the cost of running my DVR 24/7, all I need to do is train my little sister to turn off her bedroom night-light. Done.