Motorola/Comcast, Can You Make a Cable Box that Sucks Less (Electricity)?

[Chris Gohlke]

<p>During some of my past reviews&nbsp;of power saving devices, I've used my Kill-a-watt to measure the power draw of a variety of my devices. &nbsp;One of the biggest frustrations has been my cable box. &nbsp;I had a Comcast/Motorola DCT 6200/2005 that constantly drew 29 watts regardless of it was on or off. &nbsp;This is one of the main reasons I've been using the <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/90187/bye-bye-standby.html" target="_blank">Bye Bye Standby</a>&nbsp;to cut power to my home entertainment system when it is not in use. &nbsp;Of course this presented its own problems since every time the cable box looses power, it looses all of the guide information and takes about an hour to re-download it after being powered up. &nbsp;But, by powering it down for 18 hours a day, I'm saving around 190 kWh per year in electricity that would have otherwise been wasted.&nbsp; <MORE /></p><p>Over the holidays, I upgraded my TV to a new model with HDMI inputs, so I recently swapped my cable box out with Comcast to the DCH6200/3385 to get HDMI outputs. &nbsp;I was also hoping that maybe they'd reduced the amount of power used by the newer boxes. &nbsp;I was really excited to see that the device even had a standby icon when I first powered it on. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed. &nbsp;This box is even worse than the old one, drawing 36 watts regardless of if it is turned on or in standby mode.</p><p>Comcast and Motorola should really be ashamed of themselves. &nbsp;Assuming just 50,000 people in my city use a cable box, and assuming that they actually use it for 6 hours a day, even the old boxes were wasting 9,500,000 kWh of electricity per year, or enough electricity to run my house for close to 1,000 years. &nbsp;Even worse, if the boxes are going to draw the same number of watts regardless of if it is on/off/standby, why even bother having those options. Why can't they do better?</p>

[Jason Dunn]

Great post! It is rather ridiculous that these companies don't put some thought into how much power their devices use...and the lack of a true standby mode is simply inexcusable. My cable box has the same problem where, when the power is completely turned off, it loses all the guide data. Why not store the guide data, then update it when the power comes back on? The purge + complete re-download seems silly.

[doogald]

We have a DVR box that I think stays on all of the time when powered down, so that it can start recording a future program that is scheduled. However, there is no reason why the device cannot hibernate and have routines that wake it up to record when scheduled and perhaps every three hours to update the guide. It is dumb. I think that these boxes, though, are engineered to cost the companies as little as possible to manufacture while still working while powered reliably, so it's probably going to take regulation to get something like this to happen.

[ptyork]

I'm almost 100% pure Libertarian/Free-Market Capitalist in just about every way and despise gov't intervention in most all cases, but the cable industry is one that needed complete regulation and oversight LONG ago. They are quasi-monopolies and, thus, operation outside of the standard economic models. This is simply one of the many ways in which this lack of standard market forces has failed the consumer, since the consumer has little to no choice/influence and both the cable providers and box manufacturers have NO incentive to improve. The only saving grace here is that they are about to collapse under their own stupidity. Thank God!

[Chris Gohlke]

Rather timely article on Yahoo! today given my post.

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/the_conscious_consumer/75/vampire-power-costs.html

Note, the electric cost quoted in their examples are significantly lower than what I pay.