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Whether the motive is saving the planet or conserving cash, nobody leaves the lights blazing in an empty house. Nobody runs the furnace and the air conditioning at the same time.
But millions of Americans are watching TV even when they're not home. Or at least that's what our electronic gear thinks, as well as the electric company.
According to a story by The New York Times, based on a report from the National Resources Defense Council, the high-definition digital video recorders and cable set-top boxes that are so much a part of our modern media lives are also gargantuan energy hogs. Even when we're not using them. Perhaps especially then.
One DVR and set-top box combo can use more juice than an energy-efficient refrigerator. Nationally, the set-top set-up requires the energy from almost three Surry power stations, or nine average coal plants, or about the energy Maryland uses.
Put another way by the NRDC, it costs Americans more than $3 billion a year - or about $8 per person - just to be prepared to watch something or record something on the nation's 160 million set-top boxes.
Two-thirds of all that energy use and cost comes when we're not actually watching anything because most of the boxes deployed in America don't ever shut off completely. Even when they're turned off.
Sadly, they're not designed to shut down. Instead, our boxes are running all the time.
The NRDC estimates that better boxes (as in Europe) and more efficient set-ups could improve things by somewhere between 30 and 50 percent.
More efficiency could come from using one box for a whole house, for example, or deploying boxes designed to actually power down when they're not in use. Or from replacing a power-hungry DVR and set-top set-up with a low-power system that streams programming over the Internet.
Or from removing the box entirely and opening a book.
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The same basic problem as health care
In health care insurance, your employer chooses your policy, but you choose when to incur costs. That split market is what drives careless and excessive use of health services and drives up costs.
Similarly, your cable company owns the box and you simply rent the box they choose. But you pay the electric bill. There is no incentive for the cable company to choose a more sophisticated and expensive box that uses less electricity.
If we were buying our own set top boxes, and simply subscribing to the provider of our choice, we would choose the energy efficient box as the savings would cover the difference in price.
But we can't, because cable companies are franchised by local government and we can't choose our own providers beyond the limited choices local governments allow us. So, we are stuck with the box that meets the cable company's needs, not ours.