Just how badly is your set-top box killing your power bill? Let's run the numbers with a new study from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
According to the figures, there are more than 160 million set-top boxes currently deployed in the United States. In 2010, these set-top boxes ate up nearly 27 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, or 168 kilowatt-hours per set-top device. In total, that's enough electricity to power the entire consumption of Maryland for a year, costing consumers more than $3 billion annually.
The core problem, claims the NRDC, is that set-top boxes are designed to draw full power even when they aren't actually being used to convert a cable or satellite signal into the images displayed onto a television screen. That's $2 billion wasted each year to power devices needlessly, and the power problem is even worse when you factor in digital video recorders (DVRs). Throw that functionality into a set-top box and you've just expanded the power draw by 40 percent.
"Better designed pay-TV set-top boxes could reduce the energy use of the installed base of boxes by 30 percent to 50 percent by 2020," says the NRDC.
The organization's proposed solutions include moving to a single-set-top-box environment for homes (using televisions and other devices that can connect to this box from another room) as well as incorporating better power-savings features in set-top boxes so that they draw less energy when not being used.
The NRDC notes that a typical set-top box configuration consumes some of the most power compared to other devices within one's home, period. A one HD-DVR and one HD set-top box configuration can draw an average of 446 kilowatt-hours of power per year: slightly higher than that of a new Energy Star-branded refrigerator (415), the TV itself (Energy Star-branded 42-inch LCD, at 275 kilowatt-hours), or a standard CFL lightbulb (17).
"NRDC's investigation and modeling of the energy consumption of pay-TV set-top boxes under business-as-usual and more energy-efficient scenarios revealed a startling fact: unless the industry deploys more energy efficient designs, the electric bill to power these devices will increase by a staggering $3.5 billion per year by 2020," says the NRDC.
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