Energy Saving Mode
 

Since the upgrade, one of my boxes powers down after about three hours when switched on and the other doesn't. So I now put them both in Standby when not used during the day, and switch off the mains overnight.

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

That's super, well done.

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

Why switch off at night? surely the whole point of V+ is to allow it to record as and when it needs to therefore stopping you from forgetting to record something. Surely by switching off at the mains you will eventually forget to switch it back on one day and miss something.

Do both boes power down after they have been on standby for a while?

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

The box apparently goes into standby mode, but still consumes a lot of power (relatively). I haven't measured it, but even if it's only a couple of Watts, over the space of a year, that is still a considerable amount of electricity.

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

If the disk actually stops spinning on Standby (it should now) , then the power drops from 24 Watts to 19 Watts ... Still quite a lot of power for something on standby.
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Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

Should it ? was there an update recently ?

I noticed the following behaviour the other day.... I asked it to record the GP which started about 6.15. I also put the box on 103 so I could rewind to the start if it forgot to do the recording.

Strangely when I came to watch at 6.30, I tried to rewind but the box gave me the coming out of hibernation message. It obviously wasn't buffering as normal. However I checked the recording and that was fine.

So obviously the HD was running as it was recording but the LiveTV buffering was in standby mode. Seems reasonable if a little odd.

In Standby mode I agree it's still a heck of a lot of power. If you put it into standby it really should power down all HD and audio/visual systems except the Scheduler/CPU.

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

Could someone from Virgin please confirm that they have in fact rolled out an update which, amongst other things, affects the way V+ standby operates and, perhaps, explain the rationale, if any. It would of course be nice to get some advance warning of such a change, assuming it has happened intentionally. Perhaps Virgin don't realise that people use the capability of coming in after the start of a program, on the fly, and rewinding to the beginning. It is quite obvious from the posts on various forums that people have been taken by surprise by this and in many cases found this to be a source of frustration, even annoyance. It may well be that there are good environmental reasons underlying such an "upgrade" (?) but this surely could have been done a little less cack-handedly.

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

People complain about the hard drive noise when it records constantly, people complain that they can rewind when it doesn't. How can they win?

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

Do they? I can't say I've ever noticed the noise of the hard drive, but I see your point if it does bother some people. In answer to your last point, Virgin can win by informing people of intended changes - simple P.R.

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

...allowing the user to chose which mode their box is in, maybe?

(just thinking aloud)

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

Good point. My DVD recorder has this option (it calls it enhanced power saving). Basically, in normal mode, there is little difference when the DVD goes into standby. The front lights go off (clock stays on though), the disc stops and the video output is shut down. Not sure what exactly it's doing, but in this mode, about once every two hours, it spins it's fans up for a minute or so, then spins them down. The upside is the recorder takes a couple of seconds to come online from standby. The downside is it makes little difference to power consumption.

In Enhanced power saving mode, the recorder shuts everything down (and disables recording). The clock still runs, but is not displayed. The advantages are that it is quieter (no fans spinning at any point) and uses a fair amount less power. The disadvantages are that it takes about two minutes to come out of standby.

My point is that there is a simple menu option to enable or disable Enhanced Power Saving mode.

Re: Energy Saving Mode
 

I agree you should have the option, I am lucky as neither of my boxes make any noise at all so I don't know when they are in power saving mode and when they are not.