little off topic - dvr energy waste

[Mike Payne]

I was wondering what you guys thought about all the energy being wasted by
dvr's. Dvr's commonly use between 35-40 watts each and run 24x7. Tivo
alone has in excess of 4 million out there, cable and sat compnaies at least
that many again. Seems like a lot of wasted power for a country that wants
tax rebates to install PV.

 

[wmbjk]

I was wondering what you guys thought about all the energy being wasted by
dvr's. Dvr's commonly use between 35-40 watts each and run 24x7. Tivo
alone has in excess of 4 million out there, cable and sat compnaies at least
that many again. Seems like a lot of wasted power for a country that wants
tax rebates to install PV.

It sucks. Same with satellite TV receivers (without built-in DVRs).
It's a demand that manufacturers could easily minimize if consumers
would demand it. But have you ever asked a clerk at an electronics or
appliance store about energy consumption? Odds are it will be the
first time a customer ever brought up the subject. And check out
plasma and LCD TVs... some use four times the energy of equivalent
sized RP sets.

We minimized the DVR problem by switching to a HTPC. Saved us about a
half kWh per day, and the hard drive should last a lot longer. Works
for us, but only because the HTPC isn't used much. Others (I know one)
leave a TV on just to display sat. audio titles, and if they had a
HTPC, that would probably be left on as well displaying a "screen
saver". So it's not just a hardware problem. Most consumers don't
grasp the folly of waste, and can't be bothered to learn.

On a brighter note, the idle needs of some things are going down. Two
components we recently added are only about 1W each.

Wayne

 

[Mauried]

That's nice, but the fact of the matter is that with careful design, the
30+ watts that my ReplayTVs each consume, 7/24/365, could pretty easily
be reduced to 2 watts or less when nothing is being played or recorded.

I was shocked to discover that the disk drives aren't automatically shut
down when the device is idle. This is a trivial feature that's
incorporated into even the cheapest laptop computer.

I would also hope that the CPU's idle task sits at a HALT instruction
when nothing else is going on. There are deeper power-saving modes that
are easily achieved without significant responsiveness degradation.

Presumably, they did this because they're striving for functionality
first. They can "go green" when there's enough demand for it. Sadly,
there's just no demand (or competition, to drive product
differentiation) yet.

Modern disk drives last much longer if they are left running than if
they are constantly being shut down.
The only reason they are shutdown in lap tops is because laptops have
limited battery life.
People get paranoid about saving energy at home , when by far most
energy wastage occurrs in industry.
have a look at the energy efficiency (or lack of it) of an aluminium
smelter.

 

[samuel chamberlain]

I was wondering what you guys thought about all the energy being wasted by
dvr's. Dvr's commonly use between 35-40 watts each and run 24x7. Tivo
alone has in excess of 4 million out there, cable and sat compnaies at least
that many again. Seems like a lot of wasted power for a country that wants
tax rebates to install PV.

yes we have a dsat tv box that draws the same amount of juice in standby
as when the device is fully running (28w) I attribute this to lazy
design . the standby button toggles nothing but video output .