What is it about a recording high definition set-top box that should make it such a power hog? These boxes have tuners and hard drives within. And these have a nasty habit of running at top speed whether or not anyone’s watching or recording anything or not. Studies by the Natural Resources Defense Council find that of the $3 billion it takes in energy bills to run these things, only about $1 billion worth of power is spent on a running them when people are actually watching or recording on them. The rest of the time, these machines just sit there idling. Now for the question of how to save power using the solar panel type blog for good information with these machines.
There are a couple of problems with the way the whole cable business is structured that wastes as much electricity on these little boxes every year as would feed the state of California for at least four months. To begin with, they don’t really care; and even when they do find themselves caring, they think about how they need to upload software changes and electronic programming guides from time to time. It becomes a lot easier doing it in the middle of the night if people have their set top boxes in a perpetual state of readiness.