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The headline of a recent blog from Sense was provocative and to the point: “Cable DVRs Promote Fake Power Saving Mode.”

Testing done by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based maker of home energy monitoring systems revealed that the power save mode of Comcast’s flagship Xfinity X1 DVR reduced power from 26 watts to 24.5 watts. “A tiny savings of only 1.5 watts — probably all coming from turning off the light that tells you it’s on!” wrote Sense’s Joe Bamberg. The DVR is always on and consuming close to full power.

Further testing done by Sense found that the power save mode on DVRs from DirectTV, Time Warner, and Verizon also offered no useful power savings — findings that were confirmed by Comcast’s own data and testing done by an independent consortium.

Put in dollar terms on a broad scale, with more than 84 million U.S. households using set top boxes from communications providers, consumers are collectively spending an extra $1.84 billion on their annual utility bills due to the inefficient design of DVRs, according to Sense.

“In addition to the fake power saving mode, the power button on the remote control for the Comcast Xfinity DVR turns the device on but won’t turn it off,” Bamberg wrote. “According to the Comcast website, the ‘off’ function on the remote control is disabled to keep the Comcast box and TV from getting out of sync. So you don’t even have the option of a full power-off. Looking at DVRs from the dominant providers, Time Warner, DirecTV, and Verizon, we discovered that none of them had a true power save mode, either, and they operated continuously.”

Always-on devices account for 23% of home energy use, according to a study by the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), which amounts to an annual expenditure of $40 billion. The kicker is that one DVR alone can account for about 10% of that power drain, according to Sense.

“Overall, DVRs and set-top boxes use something like 21 TWh [TeraWatt Hours] (estimate from 2017),” Bamberg wrote. “Rolling out two-thirds savings based on implementing a real power saving mode in existing designs would save more than 14 TWh of energy — over 1% of all U.S. residential usage. This would save U.S. consumers $1.84 billion per year and avoid carbon emissions equivalent to almost five coal-fired power plants. Going all the way to the potential 90% savings by making use of existing mobile device technologies would save consumers almost $2.5 billion per year and avoid emissions equivalent to more than six coal-fired power plants.”

To provide context, Sense pointed to examples of other electronics products that consume far less energy than DVRs. Cable DVRs typically consume 20-27 watts while in use or idle. By comparison, Sony’s PlayStation4 uses only 8.5 watts in energy saving mode. The iPhone consumes less than 1 watt while on and only 0.05 watts in sleep mode.

DVR power consumption could be reduced by 90% if cable providers “took a page from mobile phone designers’ playbooks,” Sense said. A change of this magnitude could reduce overall U.S. residential energy consumption by 1.3%, saving $2.5 billion annually.

“Consumers have little control over their choice of cable DVR, and most people assume that turning off the TV will lower their energy costs,” said Sense CEO Mike Phillips. “Meanwhile, cable DVRs are always on, using far more energy than necessary. To add insult to injury, cable providers have been crowing about their energy efficiencies, which lag the rest of the high tech industry by a huge margin. The cable industry needs to step up and implement mobile-tested hardware to significantly lower the energy costs of their DVRs.”

In his blog, Bamberg says significant savings can be achieved through software and hardware fixes that enable DVRs to go into low-power “sleep modes” between recordings.

For more information, visit blog.sense.com.