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"  Weapons Against Waste: Switchable power strips let you kill juice to components you&amp;#039;re not using. An HDMI switch routes AV signals around your home theater receiver when you&amp;#039;re not using it. A wattmeter identifies the worst power offenders. Save the home theater for when you&amp;#039;re watching movies. No need to waste watts during the morning news.  Multichannel surround-sound systems can bring a stunning theater-like soundscape to your living room. Great if you&amp;#039;re getting your Michael Bay fix, but overkill if you&amp;#039;re just watching the morning weather report\u2014especially when you consider how much power these sound systems suck up. We hooked up a wattmeter (everybody should have one) to a typical 37-inch LCD HDTV and cable box, and found that the combo used a total of 172 watts. When we added a 5.1-channel home theater with a powered subwoofer, it kicked our consumption up to 244 watts. Watch a movie through a Blu-ray-playing PlayStation 3, and the total goes up to a whopping 444 watts. That&amp;#039;s two and a half times the electricity usage of the TV and cable box alone. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that modern home theater receivers are often used as HDMI routers, meaning they take video inputs from multiple sources (cable box, Blu-ray player, game system, etc.), and output them all to your TV using a single HDMI cable. This arrangement keeps things organized, but it also means that the sound system is on whenever the TV is\u2014powering a constellation of speakers and, likely, a subwoofer, even during shows that don&amp;#039;t really benefit from multichannel, room-filling surround sound.  Keeping components turned off when they aren&amp;#039;t needed can make a noticeable difference in your energy bill. The key is to arrange your home theater system so that it&amp;#039;s easy to switch among different input devices and sound systems without having to rewire all of your AV gear whenever it&amp;#039;s movie night. The easy way to toggle between sound systems: an HDMI switch that has a digital audio output.  But before you buy an HDMI switch, you&amp;#039;ll need to make sure it will work with your speaker system. Some AV receivers have optical audio inputs and others have coaxial audio inputs. See which one yours has and get an HDMI switch with the same type of audio connection. Remote-controllable HDMI switches with digital audio outputs are available from companies such as Octava and Kramer Electronics for $250 to $350. Hook your cable box, gaming machine and Blu-ray player to the HDMI inputs, link the HDMI output directly to your TV, then plug the digital audio connection into your receiver and turn it on only when you want a surround-sound infusion. And if you&amp;#039;re really serious about minimizing electrical waste, plug all of your nonessential AV gear into a separate power strip and kill its power when its devices aren&amp;#039;t in use (this will cut down on the standby, or &amp;quot;vampire&amp;quot; power leakage that occurs when unused devices are left plugged in). Belkin even makes a remote-controllable power strip called the Conserve that allows you to maintain consistent power to devices that you use all the time (DVR, Wi-Fi router), while completely killing power to unused gear. Home Theater Energy Use  Terms to Know: AMOLED For years, techies have been yearning for a flexible-display technology, which could allow for impossibly compact gadgets\u2014such as portable media players or e-book readers\u2014that are capable of being rolled up when they aren&amp;#039;t in use. Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode displays, which have a matrix of pixels that light up when electrically activated, have presented some of the most promising flexible-display prototypes so far. AMOLEDs also use less power than traditional OLEDs. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/how-to/a4804/4332705/>