8 weeks of clean living

Recently I reported on the idle energy use of the various components that make up my small entertainment center. Over the past few days I’ve kept the Kill A Watt plugged into the power strip that supplies electricity to all of my entertainment devices to see how much energy they consume under normal use. Over 164 hours of testing, the devices in question consumed 7.3 kWh of electricity. By my calculations this is equivalent to approximately 32.5 kWh per month or 390 kWh per year. In other words, about a month and a half’s worth of my electricity consumption per year is used solely for my entertainment devices. As before, these devices included my TV, Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 2 and DVR/cable box. Additionally, I use the power strip for charging my MacBook from time to time and powering a Klipsh 2.1 speaker sound system.

This is only tangentially related, but I recently canceled my cable service for a few reasons. First, my DVR/cable box was a prime suspect for substantial and necessary idle energy consumption. Second, the value proposition for cable seems to be getting weaker. In order to get cable internet, HD, HBO and DVR I was paying approximately $135 per month. For comparison, now I am getting 3.0 Mbps DSL for $35 per month, Netflix for $18 per month and buying TV shows as needed (and à la carte) off of iTunes for two dollars apiece or around $30 a season. The only real losses are HBO and live sports. Not having HBO on cable essentially introduces a time lag until the shows appear on Netflix. Live sports are harder to replace, but services like MLB.TV for baseball might be a good replacement (or, especially for baseball, listening to live shows on the radio). Finally (and this is a super fringe benefit) I now have enough room in my TV stand to integrate the power strip and make its on/off switch easier to access (see bottom-leftmost device below), allowing me to more frequently prevent idle power consumption. Now that I’ve made this change, I might do another round of power consumption testing to see what kind of impact better idle power management and no cable makes on my entertainment center energy use.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Energy, Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.