IGX

In the middle of the night, when most Americans are sound asleep, their lights and appliances off, a power hog is wide awake and running at nearly full throttle: the boxes that operate their cable or satellite television service.

The seemingly innocuous appliances — all 224 million of them across the nation — together consume as much electricity as produced by four giant nuclear reactors, running around the clock. They have become the biggest single energy user in many homes, apart from air conditioning.

Cheryl Williamsen, a Los Alamitos architect, has three of the boxes leased from her cable provider in her home, but she had no idea how much power they consumed until recently, when she saw a rating on the back for as much as 500 watts — about the same as a washing machine.

A set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power, costing about $8 a month for a typical Southern California consumer. The devices use nearly as much power turned off as they do when they are turned on.

"I could yank the power supply cord," Williamsen said, "but that's not a very consumer-friendly way to reduce energy consumption."

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pow ... tml#page=1

goddamn it.

Fucking cable companies.

I cut the cord about 4 months ago and it hasn't been that bad. Glad we did it.

Not defending the cable company, plenty of good reasons to hate them, but there's some exaggeration there. A watt device left on 24/7 costs about $1.55 on average in California, which has about the highest electrical rates in the country, which of course fuck them they deserve.

That number is for DVRs, not a plain cable box, and I just checked my DVR and the watt draw is in the high 20s not 35. That's still not nothing but it's a computer inside (hard drive and etc.) and it has to be on whenever your favorite shows are on, the whole point is it is on and recording when you're not watching, so yeah.

And plus in the cold weather who cares? You get the wasted electricity back as heat. Whether the electricity goes through a baseboard heater or through a DVR you get the same amount of BTUs of heat. The heat runs six months of the year or more in the civilized parts of the country. The people that live in the heating free states can shut the fuck up, don't even have to scrape their windshields and wearing shorts in February when I am shoveling the white menace. Shut the fuck up.

I think you get a lot more sleep with a DVR. With the DVR, I can sleep on the couch in front of Gunsmoke reruns that come on at noon and Alaskan redneck shows that come on in the middle of the night. Out cold inside of a half hour most of the time, like ambien without the hangover. With streaming you can't sleep because you have to fuck with something every ten minutes to keep seeing what you're watching, more annoying than commercials. Without these modern improvements to TV, which let you watch what you want when you want, you are fucked. You just have to watch what's on now, which is barbaric, and man there is nothing on at night. It's all amateur singing contests, and fat-gawking shows, and OJ's lawyer's kids' shows, and nobody can sleep when their intellect is getting that kind of an assraping.

The bottom line is if I have to pay another $18 a year or whatever to keep me from talking to people or reading a book at night that is a great value.

Ccrow, glad we could help