Televisions and energy use

I’ve done a very quick survey on a handful TVs of different ages and sizes, just to give a rough idea on how much power they use. Obviously different makes and models would use different amounts of electricity.

• 14″ Panasonic CRT, 20 years old, on=39W, standby=6W
• 21″ Panasonic CRT, 10 years old, on=55W, standby = 2W
• 28″ Philips CRT widescreen, 5 years old, on=80W, standby=2W
• 37″ Panasonic Plasma widescreen, 1 year old, on=220W, standby=18W, off=2W (!)

 The amount of power used by the larger three varies depending on the brightness of the scene, but these seemed like typical values. LCD TVs should use less energy than equivalent sized CRT TVs, but as the trend is for larger and larger screens, the power usage goes up accordingly. There is still some debate over power consuption of LCD vs Plasma TVs - LCDs use a constand amount of power, but the amount used by a Plasma screen depends on the brightness of the scene - on dark scenes they will probably use less power, but on bright scenes they will use more, sometimes upto 100W more.

Note the standby figures, especially the Plasma, which still uses 2W even when it is switched off at the TV! Please make sure that you switch your TVs off when not in use.

More energy saving hints on the Green Saving Expert website.

This entry was posted on 22/05/2009 at 03:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.