‘Light Sleep’ Mode Cable Boxes Will Bring 20% Energy Savings, Says CableLabs
The cable industry it will start deploying this year digital set-top boxes with a “light sleep” mode that will offer energy savings of 20 percent or more. The energy savings evaluation was made by CableLabs’ Energy Lab. As part of an energy conservation initiative announced in November (CD Nov 21 p6), the six largest cable companies, with 85 percent of U.S. cable subscribers, committed to deploying a “light sleep” mode for new set-tops beginning in September. Light sleep is a low-power condition that allows essential activities in the box to continue while energy use associated with other tasks, such as channel tuning and video display, is stopped when the box isn’t in use. Monday’s announcement by CableLabs follows efforts under way at the Department of Energy to set mandatory power use limits for set-tops.
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Some boxes with light sleep functionality are already being deployed, CableLabs said. “To further accelerate energy savings in the millions of existing digital set-top boxes, the operators will also begin providing software upgrades this fall to set-top boxes already in consumer homes to enable light sleep in models capable of the functionality.” CableLabs’ measurements show “significant improvement” in overall power use when the software shifts the box to a light sleep mode when not in active use, it said. “Applying EPA estimates for how long a typical set-top powers down and the average energy savings we measured, this indicates annual energy savings of about 35 kilowatt hours per set-top,” said CableLabs Chief Technology Officer Ralph Brown. “We anticipate that operators will have more than 10 million set-top boxes in light sleep operation by the end of this year."
Efficiency advocates applauded the industry’s efforts. “Due to this light sleep initiative, more than 10 million installed DVRs will now use 20 to 30 percent less energy when they are being used,” Noah Horowitz, Natural Resources Defense Council senior scientist, said in written remarks distributed by CableLabs. “This one change alone will save consumers over $44 million per year in electricity costs.” CableLabs said its findings of energy use reductions from light sleep are based on measurements of three commonly used brand of boxes from “prominent cable industry suppliers,” each “running electronics program guide software,” without identifying the brand or the device makers.