I can confirm that my DVR cable box used over 25 watts when it is turned "off’. When I checked this on the AvsForum, some people confirmed it. They said there are more efficient chips available, but the cable companies have little incentive to deploy them.
I was pleased to discover that my EEE nettop only pulls a few watts on standby, so I rarely shut it off and coming out of standby only takes a few seconds. If you need to leave a computer on all the time, I found that a netbook only pulled a few watts when the screen powered off.
That’s a relatively recent innovation for LCD displays that use LED backlighting - but it’s an inherent property of plasma displays, in which each pixel produces only the light needed to achieve its designated brightness levels.
We have a 65" plasma TV. I haven’t yet tested the power consumption, but I’m very curious to see how much it varies between a pure-black image and a pure-white image.
Not clear what you mean by “turned off.” If it’s a DVR, then I would guess the hard drive inside is still spinning and buffering program content, even if you’re not watching it, which means the rest of the supporting electronics are active as well. That’s the case with TiVo, which doesn’t really have an “off” mode. Late-model SATA hard drives are down to about 6 watts, which in your case leaves only 19 watts to run the rest of the system. The cooling fan probably eats up a watt or two, plus you’re probably losing another couple of watts in the inefficiency of the power supply transformer/rectifier. That leaves just 15 watts or so to run the rest of the supporting electronics in there, which doesn’t seem all that bad.
Definitely go after the big energy-hungry appliances first. I recently replaced the heating elements and thermostats on our electric water heater, combined with a flush-out, and last month’s electric bill was $50 lower than I expected. If I put a timer on it, I’d save even more by having the heater only turn on when people are home and using hot water; really, what’s the point of the heater running between midnight and 4 AM?
Another simple thing: vacuum dust and crud off your refrigerator coils. For most fridges these days, the coils seem to be under the grille on the bottom. Removing the dust lets the fridge operate more efficiently.
“off” is a huge minefield of misunderstanding with modern electronics. Like my Wii example there is off but still have wifi and bluetooth running. Off with the button glowing red instead of orange and unplugged off.
As someone who works in the cell phone industry 15 watts is an enormous amount of power. I can watch youtube videos over the cell network using only a couple of watts. That is a lot more processing power than is needed to demodulate and re-encode the the picture.
That’s probably because they are of the “powered” variety. Passive speakers (voice coil+speaker cone) consume no power beyond that of the amplifier that drives them.
I mean off as in I press the off button. In that mode, it should only use enough power to monitor the infrared port and the keyboard and a timing circuit to wake up when it is time to record a show. It could be implemented as a function inside the main processor or as a separate micro-controller that would only draw milliwatts.
Here is a link to the Avsforum discussion:
After looking at the Bright House DVR website, they talk about being able to pause/rewind live TV, implying that the DVR is buffering program content through the hard disk. Is it possible this system is still active even after you’ve pressed the “off” button? Can you hear whether or not the disk spins up/spins down when you hit that off button?