Energy Star or black hole?
Last updated Jan 18, 2009 — 4559 views
DeviceGuru received an interesting email describing several less-than-satisfactory experiences with the power-saving modes of “Energy Star compliant” consumer devices. The writer’s observations suggest a pressing need to amp up regulations governing consumer electronics power management.
Martin Hellman writes…
I’d been meaning to write to you about this, and your Dec. 17, 2008 DeviceGuru blog post, Make a Green New Year’s Resolution, reinforced that. My experience indicates that the Energy Star program needs a major overhaul.
Power-sucking TV
I recently bought a Sony KDL-37XBR6 TV, which is supposed to be Energy Star compliant and whose spec’s (confirmed by Sony) say it draws less than 0.1 watt in sleep mode. Well, my measurements show an average of about 15 watts over a couple of days. Admittedly, sometimes it gets down to a fraction of a watt or even zero on my meter. But about 75 percent of the time it is drawing about 20 watts.
I called Sony and, while initially interested, they have been unresponsive for about a month in spite of multiple emails and phone calls. I suspect that the problem has to do with their TV guide, which is picked up from PBS stations. When the tuner is on to try and find the guide, I can see 20 watts as being needed (though still on the high side). If that’s what’s going on, it is highly misleading to say what they do.
Although I’d be happy to turn off the TV guide (which we don’t really need) to reduce unnecessary energy consumption, there doesn’t appear to be a way to do that.
iMac insomniacs
About two years ago I figured out that my iMac was not going to sleep even though the screen was blank and the LED was on. A bit of sleuthing brought out that a constantly-on LED meant only the screen was sleeping, while a dimming and brightening LED meant the system was sleeping. My LED was constantly on! It took some more detective work to figure out that my mail program, Eudora, was the problem. Qualcomm had stopped supporting it, so it hadn’t been updated to work with the new Mac OS (10.3?) and prevented the Mac from sleeping.
It’s therefore particularly annoying that my new iMac dispensed with that LED entirely, so now I have no way of knowing its sleep status! I currently have my power meter on a new external disk drive and can tell when the Mac is sleeping because then the drive also goes to sleep and draws less power. And there have been times lately when it should have been sleeping based on no activity within the specified timeframe, but was still awake at the system level. (The screen was blank, though.)
Set-top toasters
Another area of annoyance is set-top boxes for cable TV (and probably satellite, but I have no experience there). They’ve gotten better, but I still wonder if they need to draw the 15-20 watts they draw constantly. Even worse are my ReplayTV units, each of which draws 35-40 watts all the time!
There’s little doubt that designers and manufacturers of next-generation consumer products need to implement power management technologies much more stringently. Still, there’s a lot that we, as users, can do to shrink our carbon footprints. If this is a concern of yours, consider making a ‘green’ New Year’s resolution.
| Want to contact the Energy Star program? You can email them at this address. |
[About Martin Hellman — Martin Hellman is renowned for his invention, with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, of public key cryptography. In addition to many other uses, this technology forms the basis for secure transactions on the Internet. Hellman’s latest project, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, has been endorsed by a number of prominent individuals including two Nobel Laureates.]
The settop boxes I am familiar with draws just under 40 watts turned on, and about 20 watts in “standby”,
The reason for this is that in standby the settop box is still running, updating the EPG. And more ore less the only thing turned off is the display outputs, and maybe the hard disk.
At least in Europe this should improve in the near future because of new rules about how much different devices can draw when in standby.
Just read Martin Hellman’s comments about Energy Star ratings for appliances. It’s not only sleep mode for electronics. We bought a Samsung refrigerator based on its Energy Star rating. Actual measurements of its electricity usage showed it uses exactly twice as much juice as its rating. We won’t be trusting Energy Star anytime soon, and have complained to Consumer Reports which apparently doesn’t verify Energy Star ratings.
Energy Star has been aware of issues regarding network connectivity
and sleep for over ten years, and has a plan to address it in the
next specification revision, effective July, 2009. It identifies “proxying”
as a way for PCs (and STBs and other devices) to maintain ‘full’ network
connectivity in sleep. For more on that see:
http://efficientnetworks.lbl.gov/enet-proxying.html
An adaptation of this could probably address the TV power issue noted above.
For clarity in power indicators, there is an IEEE standard on the topic, IEEE 1621:
http://eetd.lbl.gov/controls/1621/1621index.html
Even with EPG and such, 20 watts is insane.
I have a DVB-T USB stick in my computer. A single USB device can only ever draw a maximum of 0.5 A at 5 V, so the stick works within a 2.5 W envelope, and probably takes less than that. That includes all RF circuitry and amps, as well as digital receiver. Only a simple CPU is now needed to extract EPG, which is probably a watt at most.
I very much doubt ATSC receivers are any different.
I am sure most of you saw the [NY Times] article “Why Obama’s Energy Savings Estimate May Be Skewed,” which addresses some of the uncertainties around Energy Star.
This is where ‘consumers’ could step in and develop a web site listing devices and their real power usage. This could then become a reference for anyone buying electronics. If the companies knew that people were buying based on real world figures, then they my just change their approach.