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The National Resources Defense Council says your cable set top box and your DVR suck more energy than your refrigerator.

I've noticed that my DVR is always on. This is frustrating. Most of the time I'm not using it. But it is on. I can turn it off, but once it wakes to record something, it stays on. Of course I can't turn it off from the power strip, because it wouldn't be able to record anything. Also, for some reason, it takes over ten minutes for it to download the program guide, which shouldn't be more than 10KB.

At least it takes a moment to spin up its hard drive; I gather American DVR's just leave them spinning.

They calculate an HD DVR at 446 KwH per year. That's about $25 at my rates, which are probably lower than yours because I live in a hydro power utopia. (I pay around 6 cents a KwH. Americans pay 12. New Yorkers pay 20.) What the NRDC report doesn't mention is that your DVR is also heating the house -- all that energy winds up as heat -- so if you're air conditioning during the summer months, you have to spend more to recool. Not a big problem in Montreal, but it must suck extra in Phoenix.

As the NRDC report makes clear, this is easy to fix. European DVRs go into standby when they're not playing video. They use 50% less electricity. My computer sleeps when it's not busy; it can go for a couple of days in standby, on battery. Engineers could obviously solve this problem in a jiff.

This is a classic case for why government should intervene in markets. No one is going to make "standby mode" their number one priority in buying a DVR -- even assuming people have any choice at all, which I, as a Bell Expressvu customer, don't. But if all set top boxes and DVRs had to go into a low-power standby mode after, say, an hour of idle time, we'd all save a lot of money. And, oh yeah, the environment.