Leaving on Your DVR at Night

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Many people wonder if they should turn their DVR off at night or put it onto standby mode. Unless you are adamant on saving power then your DVR should be left on. A DVR is designed to be left on at all times so that it can manage your recording schedule, if you turn it off at night and unplug it then it will be unable to record any of your shows.

Most DVRs, including TiVo can be put into standby mode to save power and they will still reactivate and record your TV shows when needed. When DVRs are set to standby most of them will switch off any lights on the display panel, and stop sending video and audio signals to the TV. Full details of how what happens when you put a TiVo DVr into standby mode can be found here.

It would be nice to see the option to have an automatic standby/powersaving mode integrated into modern DVRs working in a similar way to PCs. With all the DVRs out there at the moment this could save a substantial amount of power. TiVo DVRs for example do not have the hard drives turn off in standby mode and so are often running unnecessarily.