The 32 Watt Vampire

In a previous post, I suggested that we should all go around the house and measure our appliances' power consumption.  I did this when I first moved in, but I didn't have DIRECTV then.  I finally got around to measuring the power used by the DIRECTV digital video recorder (DVR).  When the DVR is on, it uses ~26 watts.  I thought that was a little high, but it's only on for an hour or so per day.  But what does it use when powered off?  24 watts!   And worse, the coax cable is plugged into a switch that also uses 8 watts at all times.  Great.  32 watts on 24 hours a day.

Last month, my average electricity use was 200 watts at all times.  That means this damn DVR accounts for 16% of my electricity use right now.  It doesn't have to be that way.  I assume it's on all the time so that it can monitor the programs so it knows when to start recording shows.  But it knows the show times well in advance.  Why can't it power on once a day to update the show times and then only turn on when a show is starting?  That would save a huge amount of energy.

Image from Seattle City Light

What's worse is that this is their newest set-top box and the damn thing is supposedly EnergyStar qualified - says so right on the front.  But it's not true.  Read for yourself.  In "single room" configuration (which is the configuration in my house and probably most houses), it is NOT EnergyStar qualified.  The DVR part of the set-top-box just uses too much power for one TV unit to ever get an EnergyStar rating.

On top of all of this, DIRECTV recommends that you do NOT repeatedly power off the box by unplugging it.  great.

There's got to be a smarter way - possibly a solid state drive that powers on only when it needs to record a show.  I'm sure Apple could design something that uses a factor of three less power.  Actually, maybe they are.

Anyway, I'm going to call DIRECTV tomorrow to complain.  Maybe if enough people complain, they'll actually do something about it. They probably don't get enough complaints at the moment because electric power is too cheap.  At the current rates in my area ($0.1035/kwh), this only amounts to about $2.40/month.  Imagine if it were three times higher.  You can be damn sure DIRECTV would be hearing about its inefficient set-top boxes then.