Help, My Home Entertainment System is a Vampire!
Halloween has come and gone. Costumes have been put away. Decorations put back in storage. But the phantoms live on. Long after even the candy has been consumed–and that process is endless enough–our homes will still be haunted by what is known as phantom loads, or vampire power.
Vampire power or phantom loads refer to the energy that electronics consume when they are switched off but continue to draw power. Sometimes an LED display clues you in to the presence of a phantom. Sometimes you can tell because a device remains warm even when it isn’t being used. Everything from your microwave to your mobile phone charger draws vampire power when it is plugged in but not being used. Indeed, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a typical American home has forty devices plugged in that constantly draw power. And it turns out that these loads account for a huge proportion of household electricity consumption–almost 10%!
At my house, we’ve done a pretty good job of exorcising our phantoms: we unplug our chargers; we turn off our computers and peripherals at night; we even unplug our coffee maker and toaster when we aren’t using them. But there is one phantom that had proved very difficult to eliminate: the one that haunts our home entertainment system.
Two years ago I caved to pressure from the sports watchers and video gamers in our family (you know who you are…) and gave my OK to a relatively fancy AV system. Up until then we had an old-school television with a simple cable box and dvd player. The biggest energy user in this system was the cable box, which we knew drew vampire power because it remained warm after we turned it off. We expelled the vampire from our old system by plugging all the components into a smart strip. The smart strip automatically and completely shut down the cable box when we turned the television off. There was a functional trade-off to this solution, however: we had to wait roughly 15 minutes after powering the system back on for the channel guide to show up.
But then, in 2010 we replaced our old system with this. Now for some of you this looks like a pretty simple system, but to us, it was loaded: a wii, an HD cable box, Apple TV, blu ray, and surround sound speakers. Oh, and the 54″ flat screen TV. You can guess what happened to our vampire, right? It returned!
Fortunately, with some nagging I was able to get the av company to install a single switch that would allow us to power the system down completely. Of course, in order for this solution to work we have to remember to flip the switch. Mostly we do remember and we live with the delayed reboot time. But sometimes we don’t and then the vampire returns with a vengeance, especially if we go a few days without using the system.
According to a recent study published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, vampires in av systems have become increasingly common and increasingly bloodthirsty, with set top boxes (i.e., cable boxes and dvrs) consuming 2/3 of their power when they are off. That’s right, 2/3 when they are turned off. In fact, the typical set draws more electricity than the typical refrigerator (446 v. 415 kwh annually).
Now, these results were startling even to me, and I was already familiar with the problem of phantom loads! The question is: are they enough to convince people to live with the functional compromise of completely powering down their systems? I’d say they would for some people. But for many others they won’t. And even people, like me, who are willing to power their systems down won’t always remember to.
Which is why we need the cable companies to provide products that offer functionality and energy efficiency. Fortunately the Energy Star program is currently phasing in stricter performance standards for Energy Star certified set top boxes, as well as incentives for manufacturers to add a deep sleep mode in which the device would draw less than or equal to 15% of power it uses in on mode. But in the meantime, here’s another very simple, very cost-effective solution you could try: an electronic timer! This is a picture of the one Jonathan Kantar of Sage Builders set one up in his home. It cost $20. Assuming you are going from a system that is always on to one that is on 6 hours a day, I’d estimate that this investment would pay for itself in less than half a year.
Which isn’t a bad deal to make, even if it is with a vampire.
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