Can STBs be auto turned off/on?

[Beefcake550]

I as just thinking about saving power and realized that my DirecTV STBs are on 24/7 for my HD-PVRs that I use with Sage.

Has anyone looked into automagically getting sage to turn on/off the STBs when it starts recording? Is it even possible?

I thought about looking at the recording schedule, but I'd also want it to somehow work for live tv as well, which lead me to think that Sage would have to actually be involved.

[GKusnick]

Cold-booting a DirecTV box takes several minutes to acquire satellite signal and so forth. I don't think you'd want to sit through that every time you turn on live TV.

So at best you're talking about putting the box into standby mode, in which it's powered up but not displaying anything. Frankly I doubt you'd actually save much power that way, but if you have a Kill-A-Watt meter you could measure it and find out. Certainly that's something I'd want to know before putting much effort into figuring out how to automate it.

[andyvr4]

I don't know if directv is anything like dish network, but with dish network I have the STB set to go to sleep after 4 hours of inactivity. Then it will wake up whenever it see's the select button pressed so I have sage broadcast out a select command before the channel each time.

[Beefcake550]

Two things I've noticed:
GKusnick:
I have an H23-600 and an H24 (i think) - cold boot means going from not being plugged into the wall (no power applied) to a usable picture. I'd agree with your time estimates. However, if I simply press the power button (hopefully going into a standby mode), it's a matter of seconds as long as AC power stays applied to the box.

andyvr4:
Thanks for the idea. I will have to check out the inactivity timeout possibilities. Would I be correct in assuming it would have to be longer the longest show you'll ever watch? Will have to check this out.

The only power data I have is I'm looking at my UPS (Cyberpower) and it displays output wattage in real time (like a kill-a-watt). I should test each component individually and see what it says before spending too much time on it. Thanks for everyone's input

[andyvr4]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

andyvr4:
Thanks for the idea. I will have to check out the inactivity timeout possibilities. Would I be correct in assuming it would have to be longer the longest show you'll ever watch? Will have to check this out.

That's correct. Assuming the box has not received any remote signals for the inactivity period it'll turn off regardless of rather you're recording anything at the time!

Also just to note with my dish network boxes there is almost no difference in power consumption having them on verse off (I mainly turn them off so the lights aren't so bright at night, haha), there was only around a 3 watt difference between on and off according to my kill-a-watt reader.