Today I got around to measuring the electricity consumption of the cable TV box that is in my home - a Comcast Motorola DCT-3412. It's an HDTV Cable TV box with DVR. Is this "powered off" cable box costing American taxpayers hundreds of millions? I measured the box's consumption by plugging it into my awesome Kill -A-Watt power meter and measuring the wattage. Surprisingly, I found that my cable box consumes just about as much power when "off" than when "on"! Here's what I measured with my Kill-O-Watt meter: "Power Off": 30 watts Watching TV: 31 watts Recording TV: 31 watts Playing back a recorded program: 31 watts Why provide a power button when it makes so little difference in power consumption? Who knows! Electricity Cost So I did some math to figure out how much 30 watts of consistent power use costs, using recent prices for electricity around here: (17¢ per kwh x 30 watts x 8760 hour...
Useful and Useless Ideas from Lance J.