Home audio & video: HDTVs (and other consumer electronics) unplugged

HDTVs (and other consumer electronics) unplugged

Do any of the HDTV brands or models hold on to their user created settings when unplugged or otherwise completely off the power grid?

In order to reduce my monthly energy bills, and my carbon footprint, I have many of my electric household appliances hooked up to power strips. When the appliances on the strip are not in use, I keep the power strip in the OFF position to conserve energy. For appliances not on power strips, I simply unplug them when they are not in use.

For some appliances, this is not possible; and, unfortunately, these are some of the most power hungry appliances even when turned “off,” or in standby mode. For example, my old CRT television is “off” for most of the day, but I know it is actually in standby so that it can react to the remote. I would like to hook it and my VCR up to a power strip so that when no one is home, they are completely off the grid. However, whenever I unplug my television or VCR, I lose all of their settings. The clocks reset to 12:00, all of my channel labels disappear, and my picture settings reset to the factory settings. This goes for my XBox 360 as well. It is quite as annoying to unplug the 360 for a LAN party then have to reset the time and date each time I plug it back in.

My laptop has no problem keeping its time and settings when off the grid. Why can’t these other appliances do the same? I realize with older appliances like my TV and VCR, they may not have the internal memory storage needed to hold on to the settings, but the 360? Come on!

So back to my question. I am considering buying an HDTV, and I keep tabs on the most energy efficient models (in both active and standby modes). What I have never seen, though, is a statement of whether modern TVs will hold on to their finely calibrated user preferences and settings if the TV is unplugged or taken off the grid. That way, I do not have to waste the energy of standby mode when I am out of the house for 10 hours at work or asleep 8 hours at night.

To further this issue, if the answer is that TVs and other such entertainment appliances (DVRs, video game consoles, cable / satellite boxes, receivers) cannot hold onto their settings when completely OFF, then how can we as consumers band together and demand such options. When there is no one model out there with that option, how can we choose it to create demand for the other companies to follow suit. Instead, it seems we must wait for the brain trusts at the companies to implement the idea on their own.

It seems like such an easy fix to me. Flash memory is so cheap these days. 4 – 8 GB memory sticks are available at inexpensive prices, and I’m sure TVs and other appliances do not require that much memory to store settings. Flash memory requires no power to store the data. Why can’t consumer electronics appliances include imbedded memory of that type sufficient to hold the settings?

Thanks in advance.