I hooked a kill-a-watt up to my Brighthouse box hd-dvd and noticed that the box pulls 24 watts when it is turned off. This seems excessive considering my computer only pulls 1 watt on standby and it is fully up and running 6 seconds after I hit a key on the keyboard. 24 watts works out to 210 kwh/year. There are refrigerators that use less power than that.

It seems to me for another buck they could have added a separate circuit to monitor the IR and a timer to power up the rest of the box.

Do all HD-DVRs draw this much standby power?

Actually yes but new chip designs are coming soon. Broadcom has announced the BCM7119 and BCM7125 which are EnergyStar 3.0 compliant. The BCM7410 and BCM7420 also has PowerManagement features. These chips will debut in a STB some time next year or 2011.

These chips will debut in a STB some time next year or 2011.

Which means cable companies should start distributing them in 2014 or so. :P

Could be by 2010-2012 when Cableco's will distribute new boxes. The BCM7119 and BCM7125 are already in the hands of Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers and I'm sure the STB companies already have access to them so they're hard at work making them.

I checked the EnergyStar site and it said that it said that it would save 2 billion dollars a year if all STBs were EnergyStar compliant.

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=settop_boxes.settop_boxes

That sounds about right, if you assume 10 cents a KWH.