Set-Top Power Drain: Cable and Digital Recording TV Boxes Cause Largest Home Electricity Use

Worried about your monthly electricity bill? Forget the refrigerator and take a good, hard look at your TV. Specifically, focus on all the set-top boxes plugged into it. They have become the largest power drain in most American homes. Who knew.

Home-based entertainment is becoming the only seemingly affordable option for many as going to the movies, attending sporting events and and other out-of-home experiences become pricier. Until recently, however, the power usage from these contraptions was not considered a serious problem. With the rise in energy prices and the stagnation in household incomes, that has changed. The biggest immediate issue is that power consumption - and billing - continue whether you are watching or not. Manufacturers have become attuned to the controversy and are promising more energy-efficient equipment. Stay tuned, as it were. JL

Elizabeth Rosenthal reports in the New York Times:

"Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems.

There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the U.S., one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box
These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day even when not in active use.

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

The study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over one year’s time.

“People in the energy-efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use,” said John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission, now with the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation. “Companies say it can’t be done, or it’s too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true.”

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 currently function in the U.S. Fixes exist, but they are not currently being mandated or deployed here, critics say.

Similar devices in some Europe, for example, can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half. They can also go into an optional “deep sleep,” which can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent compared to when the machine is active.

Alan Meier, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said of the industry in the United States, “I don’t want to use the word ‘lazy,’ but they have had different priorities, and saving energy is not one of them.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes, and the agency has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013, said Ann Bailey, director of Energy Star product labeling. The voluntary seal indicates products that use energy efficiently. But today, there are many boxes on the list of products that meet the Energy Star standard that do not offer an automatic standby or sleep mode.

“If you hit the on/off button it only dims the clock; it doesn’t significantly reduce power use,” said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the natural resources council.

Energy efficiency is a function of hardware, software, the cable network and how a customer uses the service, said Robert Turner, an engineer at Pace, which makes set-top boxes that can operate using less power while not in active use. Cable boxes are not designed to be turned completely off, and even when in deep sleep mode, it takes time to reconnect and “talk” with their cable or satellite network, though that time is highly variable depending on the technology.

Wilson said he routinely unplugs his set-top boxes at night and waits only 45 seconds for television in the morning. But Meier said that when he tried to power down his home system at night, it took “hours” to reboot because the provider “downloaded the programming guide in a very inefficient way.”

These devices may cause an increase of as little as a few dollars a month or well over $10 for a home with many devices. In Europe, electricity rates are often double those in the United States, providing greater financial motivation to conserve.

Cisco Systems, one of the largest makers of set-top boxes, said in an e-mail that it would offer some new models this year that would cut consumption by 25 percent “through reduced power used in ‘on’ and standby states.” There will be no deep sleep or fully “off” setting.

Indeed, the biggest challenge in reducing energy use is maintaining the rapid response time now expected of home entertainment systems, Turner said. “People are used to the idea that computers take some time to boot up,” he said, “but they expect the TV to turn on instantly.”