They shouldn't be idling at 100W after a reset, more like 10-20W the majority of which is often the fan. After a reset the board turns on the 1V power supply to the chips, but it runs at 0.85V and does not enable the clocks until the self test starts. The chips only pull a few watts at this point.
The only time I could see it idling at 100W is if it was at a high voltage after having run for awhile (like 1.15V) and for whatever reason work isn't being sent to the chips, but the clocks are still on.
Thank you for the clarification...
So any ideas why sometimes I come home with a miner with no lights on at all and CGMiner saying its connected but hashing 0? And sometimes I'll reboot the pi and the card still wont' come back.. Power it off, wait N number of minutes (more than 5, 20 works all the time) and it comes back to life just fine.
What firmware on the Chilis and cgminer version?
Power cycling it will bring the draw back down to the few watt mark again, whether you wait a couple seconds or a couple hours.
On startup the board measures three sensors and waits for them to cool if needed before enabling the chips; the internal temperature of the VRM chip (30C), the temperature of the sensor near the FETs (37C) and the internal sensor of the thermal diode measurement chip (30C). Once those have dropped and settled it uses that information to calibrate the thermal diodes on the ASICs, which can vary quite a bit from chip to chip. So long as your ambient temperature isn't very close to or over 30C, it should start.