Anyone ever measure how much power is used by the cable box if you leave the power on verse shutting it off. Since there is no discreet on/off leaving it on work better but if there is a cost I would like to know

I used a Kill-A-Watt power meter to take these measurements.

Sony DHG-HDD500 DVR:
on = 35W
off = 34W

Scientific Atlanta 3250HD (non-DVR):
on = 19W
off = 18W

Basically, 1 Watt is saved by turning it off.

Th government is coming up with new powersaving requirements for Cable and Satellite boxes but I don't know when they will go into effect.
The problem today is that the diskdrives run 24x365 as does the IR receiver for the remote control. The only thing that is actually turned off is the outputs from the box over all of its interfaces.

thanks, have you also done a PC in standby vs off?

No, because I never put my PC in standby.

Haha, 1W is saved by turning the box off. The only thing it does(at least for the Comcast moto boxes) is stop the hard drive from caching whatever channel the tuners are at, and of course turn off the video and audio outputs. The drive never stops spinning, it just stops caching. You can tell if you get up close to the box and turn it off, you can hear the drive stop chattering, but still spinning.