Did you know this about your cable box? (and the other 250 million cable boxes that will in homes in North America by 2009 that will be turned on even when they are off)


from Vancouver Sun newspaper Sat Sept 30 2006

Gary Hamer had a set of worry beads right about now, he'd be rattling like a rusted pickup racing along a gravel road.
The source of his anxiety is the digital cable box glowing underneath a television in the living room of a nondescript home in Port Moody. The box is lit up, even though the television is off.
Over the next 12 months, this box will consume $10 worth of electricity -- 85 per cent of that power being consumed when nobody is watching TV.
For Hamer, BC Hydro's senior energy management engineer, the box is not only an example of wasted energy.
It's the manifestation of a developed nation's faith that another source of energy is always around the corner to sustain our infatuation with technology.
That faith may be ill-founded.
The world's primary energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, noted in a recent report that the planet faces a "severe" challenge in securing a clean, sustainable and affordable energy system.
It says electricity generation for lighting is a "major source" of greenhouse gas emissions -- equivalent to 70 per cent of the annual emissions coming from the world's automobiles.
The low cost of electricity is identified by the agency as the single largest disincentive to consumer pressure to make changes such as adopting energy-efficient lighting, or energy-smart electronic devices.
For example, the agency says a typical British person uses 12,000 times as much light as 200 years ago -- although the share of disposable income necessary to buy that light has stayed the same.
Hamer believes there would be more pressure for change if only consumers recognized the scale of the challenge ahead.


Just consider what is expected to happen to our already overstressed energy grid as the popularity of digital TV boxes increases.
Each little box consumes 155 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Nobody turns them off because it takes a couple of hours to reboot all the guide information they contain.
Hydro estimates 500,000 B.C. households have these units. By 2010, there will be 2.2 million.
Unless manufacturers find a way to curtail the amount of power the boxes consume, B.C.'s 2.2 million units will devour 350 gigawatt hours of electricity per year.
That's enough power to annually meet all the residential electrical needs of Greater Vancouver's sixth-largest city, Delta.
You'd have to add another hydro facility the size of Hydro's Buntzen Lake system -- or eight Alouette Lake systems -- to create the extra power required.
That's just the B.C. picture.
Across Canada, 22 million digital boxes will be in use by 2010 -- consuming enough electricity to otherwise supply every household in Vancouver and Surrey combined -- to keep Canadians up to date with their TV listings and pay-per-view channel access.
To create that much power, you would need an additional hydroelectric facility the size of the Peace Canyon system in northeast B.C -- the province's fourth-largest system.
Take a broader view, and you begin to appreciate the size and scope of the problem that Hamer is looking at.
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has given U.S. TV broadcasters a deadline of 2009 to convert all of their broadcasts to high-definition TV.
That means about 220 million of those digital boxes -- eating up enough electricity to light 3.5 million homes, or four times the number of households in all of Greater Vancouver.
They will consume 2.6 times the power coming from the No. 1 source of electricity in all of British Columbia, the Gordon Shrum Generating Station at W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the Peace River system.
You'd have to flood a region with a surface area of 4,680 square kilometres to meet the demand from all those boxes.
That's more than twice the surface area of the largest body of fresh water in B.C., the Williston Reservoir that feeds the Bennett/Shrum system. You could fit Stanley Park into it 1,170 times.
BC Hydro's internal culture has developed a name for appliances that consume power while on standby. They are called "vampire loads" because they drain energy out of the electrical system without returning any value to either the consumers who own them or the economic life of the province.
Their continued and expanding use compels electricity providers to accelerate development of new supplies.



Hydro's Hamer sits on a Canadian Standards Association technical committee that is preoccupied by digital signal boxes.

"It's kind of funny sitting around the table," says Hamer,


"because the manufacturers say, 'We only build what the cable companies tell us to build.' The cable companies say, 'We only build what the customers want to bring in.'


"Nobody is concerned about the power consumption."

There's more to this impending horror story.
In a typical home, the array of devices adds up quickly -- computers, printers, second and even third TVs, modems, cellphone chargers and many others. Even regular incandescent lights, as the International Energy Agency noted, are a threat to future energy security.
The agency says switching to energy-efficient lighting such as compact fluorescent and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) would save the world $2.6 trillion US by 2030.

The above was very eye opening for me on power consumpion of the masses.

Perhaps Motorola and SA can come up with a solar panel power upgrade?

The amount of power reported consumed by these devices is, presumably, accurate. However, when they speak of how many homes could be lit by the amount of power that these boxes consume in the middle of the night, it is only fair to consider lighting those homes...in the middle of the night. When everybody wants their lights off because they are sleeping.

If I unplug my box from 9 p.m. until 7 a.m., that will not make any more power available during the day. Yes, it will keep power from being consumed at night, and that would lower both the power bill and the amount of money spent to generate that power...but what would the power companies do if everybody, literally everybody, turned off and unplugged everything in the middle of the night? And street lights went out, and signs went off...we could take power consumption to zero at certain times of day and this would not help the daytime situation. It might make things worse, because they would have to spend time and money switching generating systems offline, then back online, in different patterns.

Wouldn't NO LOAD be a horrific situation for a generating system?

Maybe not, but you'll FEEL better doing your part to save the planet, and that's what really counts.

I will worry when we run out of electricity. Until then, plug it in and leave it on. :)

But did you catch the most insidious part of the article.......we just don't pay enough for electricity........

this from the same sort of tree-hugger crowd that always claims to be for the little guy.......the one's hit the hardest if power rates went up.

It's the exact same argument as the people that tout "over-population" it doesn't exist either....as needs increase the production goes up, just because today they can't envision ways to produce enough, doesn't mean that next year we run out...

It means that some inventor somewhere is going to become very rich, just like John Deere....(or who ever it was that invented the tractor for farming. World-wide agricultural production is at an all time high thanks to newer technologies and the most recent devolpments will continue this trend upwards)



That being said.......I would like motorola and SA to find a better way to reduce power consuption, but not to save the planet, but to lower my own electrical bill!!

I would just be happy with a freaken discrete on and off.

Discrete power on, discrete off, would be nice.....but the frikkin box does not go "off" when u turn it "off" anyway . Only the front panel LED goes off...... oooh what a cost savings!

I dont see how these cable boxes could get any worse. The ones that had fake wood paneling on them were better.

hypocritic, tree-huging, hippies! Just junk your tv and read book, via candle light!

Don't get me wrong , I really don't care about the 10 or 15 dollars in electricity my cable box uses a year, buts it just me, or do ya think they could design and build a peice of electronics for energy efficiency for the masses, if they where gonna sell 230 milion of them!

Somehow I'm not surprised at Brent's vapid reasoning, given his relative moral sensibilities. "Tree huggers," and "hippies." If any of you would pay just a little attention to your history you might discover that conservation was once a Conservative value and political position. The idea that a current generation owes it to future generations to preserve ought not to be considered so radical. You might just put together the 2+2 that clean, unpoluted air and water might not be a political position but a humanitarian necessity. Basic economics teaches that behavioral change is often predicated upon price. Waste continues until it is economically too painful. Is it really that challanging--even for a Red Sox fan-- to figure out that efficient use of scarce natural resources is in everyone's interest? Tax credits are provided for those who install high efficiecy energy consumers like refridgerators and air conditioners? No one cares about conservation until man made folly makes natural disaster's worse. Eroding wet lands in and around New Orleans makes hurricanes more virulent. Importing more oil only provides more financial resources for the terrorist nations attacking us. Using more scarce water for power will only exacerbate the water rights problems fast approaching the south west. We all benefit from conservation.


Alan

Okay, you are totally right.

However, the net effect of the leftish sensibilities championing "conservation" showed up recently in North Carolina. Some little species was identified as perhaps in danger of elimination. You know what happened? Everybody in the county who EVER considered building on any property that they owned got out the chain saws and CLEAR CUT their property! They all wanted to do so before the thing got on the endangered species list.

And remember that spotted owl, or whatever it was, that was dying out in the Northwest? Where loggers lost their jobs and some places turned to ghost towns? It has been determined that the owls were dying out not because of logging, which they seemed to be adapting to quite well, but due to natural enemies (that isn't the word but I can't think of the right one right now). In other words, logging was cut back, people lost jobs, money and property, and it did absolutely no good because the problem was not what the treehuggers thought it was. Junk Science Smiting People. Again.

To save energy, I will not say what I do or don't believe, just that I am not politically correct. This is an effort to save energy.

My question on the cable boxes is: What exactly are they doing that generates so much damn heat? It must be the processor, correct? So, why cant' they make the thing hibernate when not it use (like a PC)?

A discrete On / Off won't cure the problem, because as stated above, the unit actually stays on, and generates the same (or very similar) levels of heat.

However, the discrete On/Off would at least allow integrators to ensure the box is ON when needed.... and give us a way to turn "off" the box so that everyone reading the OT article will be able to sleep at night.

I with Alan on the conservation thing. At the same time I understand how environmentalists have often done more to hurt their own movement than help it.

And Alan, who amongst us is going to criticize our clients for taking a beautiful chunk of pristine wilderness, razing it to the ground, and building a 20,000 sq ft monster, with 200000 watts of audio, etc etc. ? :-)

Dirty hippies, take a shower!!!!!!!