Digital Home Thoughts: Motorola/Comcast, Can You Make a Cable Box that Sucks Less (Electricity)?

During some of my past reviews of power saving devices, I've used my Kill-a-watt to measure the power draw of a variety of my devices. One of the biggest frustrations has been my cable box. I had a Comcast/Motorola DCT 6200/2005 that constantly drew 29 watts regardless of it was on or off. This is one of the main reasons I've been using the Bye Bye Standby to cut power to my home entertainment system when it is not in use. Of course this presented its own problems since every time the cable box looses power, it looses all of the guide information and takes about an hour to re-download it after being powered up. But, by powering it down for 18 hours a day, I'm saving around 190 kWh per year in electricity that would have otherwise been wasted.

Over the holidays, I upgraded my TV to a new model with HDMI inputs, so I recently swapped my cable box out with Comcast to the DCH6200/3385 to get HDMI outputs. I was also hoping that maybe they'd reduced the amount of power used by the newer boxes. I was really excited to see that the device even had a standby icon when I first powered it on. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed. This box is even worse than the old one, drawing 36 watts regardless of if it is turned on or in standby mode.

Comcast and Motorola should really be ashamed of themselves. Assuming just 50,000 people in my city use a cable box, and assuming that they actually use it for 6 hours a day, even the old boxes were wasting 9,500,000 kWh of electricity per year, or enough electricity to run my house for close to 1,000 years. Even worse, if the boxes are going to draw the same number of watts regardless of if it is on/off/standby, why even bother having those options. Why can't they do better?