We have two televisions. We have an old JVC that’s lasted me probably fifteen years now with few problems, although every once in a while the color goes funny on it for no obvious reason. And we have a small Sony HD set, although we don’t pay for HD channels. The only real difference between them, aside from their aspect ratios, is that the Sony takes about twenty seconds to power up. I find this annoying, as I do not expect to have to wait for my television to turn on. I expect that from a computer, but it’s also something I hate about computers, and it’s why I almost never power my computer down. I basically only power down when I’m having some performance issue. What can I say? I’m an impatient person.
Now, the New York Times is reporting that cable set-top boxes use as much energy annually as the state of Maryland. For most models, turning them off does not significantly reduce the amount of power they draw, which can be as much as a refrigerator or air conditioning unit. If you unplug the unit it can take minutes, or reportedly an hour in some cases, for the boxes to reboot completely. The cable companies do not want to make people wait for their teevee, plus they like to have the boxes on so they can upload and download information to/from them.
Some European boxes have standby and deep sleep modes that save energy, but these units are slow to power up.
So, I’m pissed off to learn how much power these boxes use, and there isn’t anything I can do about it right now except to unplug the units when I’m not using the television. And I’m a person who doesn’t want to wait twenty seconds.
I can probably be convinced that the hassle is worth the money saved and conservation achieved, but we definitely need a better system. Politically, no one wants to be responsible for making people wait a minute or more for their television to come on. So, this will be solved through some technological means.
Well this is obviously the fault of Obama and, most likely, Al Gore too.
I think it’s high time for Andrew Breitbart to go undercover in his cable guy outfit and get to the bottom of this so that we can finally expose the liberal agenda for what it is. In fact, he might already be on the case. I saw this guy the other day driving around in my neighborhood. Looked kind of suspicious to me.
Hmmmm…..a little Grecian Formula on the gray and there seems to be an uncanny resemblance.
Sherry in ‘Logjammin’: [on video] You must be here to fix the cable.
Maude Lebowski: Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here.
The Dude: He fixes the cable?
Maude Lebowski: Don’t be fatuous, Jeffrey.
Love that movie. A classic.
smart bombs?
you realize that we spend more on air conditioning for our deployed troops than we spend on NASA?
I unplug the printer, otherwise it uses power.
Some electronics don’t go off with the power button. Add all of it up and a lot of power is wasted.
I dunno. I don’t think it’s the cable box’s fault. We don’t have a cable box and our HD flat screen still takes a half a minute to show an image. The little blue light comes on in immediate response to the remote ON button but nothing happens on the black screen for, yeah, around 20 seconds.
You really would have been driven crazy back in the day when every time we turned on the old black & white tv, we had to fiddle with the “rabbit ears” to get the static confusion out of the way. Depending on the weather conditions, there were nights we couldn’t get some channels to do more than flicker at us. AND, when we wanted to change the channel, we had to get up out of our comfy chairs, walk across the room, turn the dial and fidget with the antenna all over again. You young whippersnappers all spoiled rotten… and get off my lawn!
I grew up half way between Philly and NYC so I had more channels than anyone. But we had to adjust the antenna depending on which city’s programming we wanted to watch. He had a remote control switch that would make the roof antenna rotate.
But we still had to get up to change the channel.
We got cable in my town in 1983, and in my part of town in 1984, so that was my first remote control teevee changer.
And don’t forget – our old TVs used vacuum tubes, so we also had to wait for a long half-minute for the wavery image to even show up. One of the things I loved about my first transistor radio was how quickly it turned on!
Makes me wonder who is the lobbying firm for small appliances/electronics. That can only be the explanation as to why they are not regulated like large appliances which must rate energy efficiency and tag their products.
read the linked article. They are regulated. They do have energy-saver stickers, for example. And they need to be more efficient starting in 2013, I think.
The problem is that efficiency is only part of the problem. These things use a lot of energy that doesn’t need to be used, regardless of how efficient they are.
They should be better regulated, but right now people would get really pissed off if they did anything.
Oh, you soft younger generation! In my day, we had to wait for the vacuum tubes to warm up and then the picture tube. And then we got to see some sort of show – anything was entertaining then – through bunches of snow.
You knew snow had to be in there somewhere.
My father’s father lived out in Pacific Palisades (UCLA professor) and he loved All in the Family. He had the first remote control I ever saw, and it had a mute button. He had this uncanny ability to mute the teevee during commercials, pick up a book, read for three minutes, and then unmute the teevee (without ever looking up from his book) at the precisely right moment.
I wondered if he counted in his head. That the first time I realized the commercial breaks are usually the same length.
I think he may have also had the first VHS or Beta I’d ever seen, which is how he could watch All in the Family all day back in the 1970’s.
After a few weeks of experimentation, I’ve come up with a way to prevent excess power consumption.
Television? Feh!
3 should be sell them on Craig’s List.
Other than that, great comment.
The problem is cheap AC to DC converters. They are terribly inefficient. They could be 90% or more efficient, but that would caost money. The cheap plugin power supply for my CPAP machine is sitting on a 12 inch square ceramic tile because otherwise it makes the carpet WAY hot. Hot enough that I fear a fire.
The problem is cheap AC to DC converters. They are terribly inefficient. They could be 90% or more efficient, but that would cost money. The cheap plugin power supply for my CPAP machine is sitting on a 12 inch square ceramic tile because otherwise it makes the carpet WAY hot. Hot enough that I fear a fire.
Well, TV’s are not actually just TV’s anymore, nor is all the other gadgets.
* The signal is digital, either thru the air or cable
* The signal potentially has somewhere between 4 and 16 or some larger multiple of more information coming than your old tv
* The ‘set top box’ handles more channels, like hundreds, maybe even
thousands,
* The set top[ box also handles some of these channels commercial interatction, i.e. payment, and other filtering (parental controls … )
* The box also does some encryption/decryption.
* DVR capabilities!!!
More issues for sure. The fact that you are using a backward compatibility mode of a 14 year old set is sort of cool really, your old stuff did not get obsoleted!
If you are not using any of this modern stuff, well, you should so you can know WTF everyone else is talking about.
The comment that all this power is being wasted cuz of cheap transformers is on the right track tho. We all know how little power smart phones can use, we should insist that this other stuff be as miserly. Maybe the issue is that power is still too cheap. Lets hope all tranistors become 22nm !!
-rms
P.S. I have a > 100 year old phone that I can still plug in and use, and I
think that backward compatability is amazaing. I did have to switch the jacks over, and it does not dial of course.
I agree that it’s a bit irritating, but it isn’t really that much of a hassle. Get yourself a surge protector like you’d use for a desktop computer. Plug your TV and settop box into that and flip the switch when you turn the TV off. Instant power cut to all of the devices. And truthfully to see some good effect you don’t need to cut the surge protector every time you turn off the TV – turn it off when you go to bed and when you leave the house for the day and you’ll already be doing something worthwhile.
You’ll save money on your power bill too – probably between $8-12 per month depending on what kind of set top box you have and what kind of TV you have. The more “always on” electronic devices you own, the more money you’ll end up saving.
Now if you have a DVR that you always use you’re out of luck there – those things suck down power and it isn’t like you can cut them off manually and still have them function the way they’re supposed to. But if it’s just a settop box and you aren’t using it as a DVR it’s pretty easy to save a few bucks and use less power.
Sadly, for me, its far more than waiting a minute. If you power off my box, it has to do a complete reboot, and (I imagine) complete diagnostics when its powered up. It takes anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to get it back. Its an extreme pain in the posterior.