TV energy consumption.
 

In my post about the work that my wife and I did to our apartment SVOBoy asked about my 30" CRTs power consumption.

I was looking at the new crutchfield catalog. There is a chart on 2 pages that has each size of TV they sell and comparisons off all the featuers and dinmensions of the TV's. All listed are LCD and Plasma TV's. Included in this chart is an estimated monthly power cost. They based this test on 6hrs per day of use and power cost at .10/killowatt hour.

As an example of 58" screens. 3 plasmas are listed and range from $3.38-$8.31per month.

The TV that uses $3.38 a month averages out to .10 per day! ten cents! for a 58" TV.

The smaller ones had a wider range. The LCDs in 37" ranged from $1.99-$3.54 per month.

This is interesting to read because the media and environmental groups portray LCD's and Plasmas as using so much more electricity. They make these TV's sound like they use $40-$100 more per month than a CRT, and that their energy consumption kills atleast 3 penguins and a polar bear per TV each month.

You should get a kill-a-watt and check it. I'll check on my 32" LCD in a day or so and report back, :)

I measured my TV's electricity consumption a couple of weeeks back. It's a 37" LCD. It uses ~160W at full brightness and ~80W at 50% brightness. It uses 7W when "off". I usally keep the power bar it's plugged into turned off (along with the settop, Wii, DVD player, etc.).

AIUI, there are newer energy star rated TVs that use 1W when off but spend about 25% of their "off" time time powered up and downloading channel guide data. The screen is off but the tuner is still fully powered. The one Sony model mentioned 20W of usage when grabbing guide data.

thats interesting. Do they still do that if you have a tuner box instead of cable card or direct connect to the TV?

My parents satelite dish would update its menu about once a week and it wouldn't do it untill the first time you pushed the channel guide menu button when its guide was close to out dated. It would usualy take about 5 min to update and was kind of a pain in the butt.

Anyone have reliable CRT TV power usage examples? This page lists a 19 inch colour TV at 70 watts. I'm assuming it's talking about CRT.

My "TV" is the LCD screen on my laptop. Seems to use about 26 watts when running on full brightness on AC.

But it's still a bit of a workout to power through the inverter using the bike generator. :p

Data point: My 26" Sharp from 1996 uses 50W when tuned to static, 7W when off. Electricity usage should varies depending on the brightness of the image (a black screen used 36W) but static should provide a usable comparison figure.

Again, IIRC, guide data downloading was a function of the QAM tuner. A settop box did not affect it nor was it something that could be disabled. I wish I could remember the link but I read it about 3 weeks ago and google fails me.


I need to learn how to use the multiple quote function. :confused:

From memory, my late-90's 27" Sony was 70-75W on, 1W off.

Wow, those numbers all seem high to me. I'll have to check my 32" CRT tonight.

those numbers could be correct. from my understanding they have made just about everything more efficent from what it was even 5 years ago...so comparing a new tv to one from the mid 90s could be a big differnce.