Big TVs = Big electric bills
posted Jun 16th 2005 8:00AM
Want to know why your electric bill's been soaring lately? No, it's not because you've got the AC cranked at 68
degrees in response to this freaking heat wave that's been hitting the Northeast. According to a recent study by the
Natural Resources Defense Council it's because of that ginormous TV set you just bought. We always figured that LCDs
and plasmas used less power than CRTs, but apparently digital HDTVs actually suck up more power than analog
TVs (see the chart below), and to make matters worse, we're buying bigger and bigger television sets than we used to.
They're predicting that in four years our TVs will be consuming 50% more power per year than they do today, what
worries them is that hardly anyone thinks about how much power their TV is going to use when they're buying it (we
certainly don't), so they're trying to get manufacturers to make their displays more energy efficient and are
asking the EPA to establish a single annual energy-consumption number for TVs that's sort of like the one they already
have for air conditioners.
[Via TechDirt]
That chart is kind of silly. While giving the reader something to think about, it borders on useless.
I have read that plasma sets use far more energy than LCD panels. LCD RPs, DLP RPs, and especially CRT RPs use less energy still -- and in that order. Did the chart make simply take an average of all these technologies (and was it weighted based on sales) or just use one of them as an example?
Which is to say, I agree with the idea of the energy-consumption number for individual TVs.
I think I'll put a big screen plasma in my SUV
Those numbers are, unfortunately, pretty meaningless. How can you simply have groups like "small HD TVs" and "big HDTVs" with all of the various technologies simply lumped in together?
All I can say is, I know that LCDs and Plasmas "use less power" than CRTs. But this is kinda... how do you say... duh! Bigger=More power makes total sense to me... or is it just me?
that TV isnt big, theyre just small!
its an interesting problem tho, heat takes the most energy to produce, and plasma screens are just a big slab of heat crystals
Uh, like, you can look at at TV's specs and see how much power it uses, worst case. They tell you the peak wattage. My old Zenith 25" TV used 80 watts. Multiply that out by the number of hours it is on, divide by 1000, and...
kWh!
So, plasma boys, how many peak watts does your toy use?
Also, one big power consumer on LCDs is the lights source. Some use fluorescent lights, but a lot of the new ones use white LEDs. LEDs use less power, and their power consumption is falling over time, as engineering improves. So just because todays LCDs are power hogs does not mean that, in the future, they still will be.
What about OLED?
I thought they just introduced the first OLED big screen TV. OLED(did I get the right acronym) was supposed to give very rich colors and contrast and significantly reduce electricity if I remember the articles correctly.
Oh...so now it's the size of our TV's that's to blame for Global Warming. Well at least we can watch the ice melt at the Poles in the comfort of our homes.
Just for comparison my Samsung LTP266W 26" also consumes 80w as #6's old tv. Seems to be a far cry from the 117kw difference in power consumption.
This article is retarded.
I wouldn't call the article "retarded" but the chart, at least, makes little sense because it does not take the technology in use into account. There really is a wide variance in power consumption.
I did notice this when shopping for a new TV... and for a lot of people, it probably should be one of the criteria by which you judge what TV is right for you. In my neck of the woods, the difference between one TV and another could mean $30 a month on my electric bill. Over a couple years, that's close to another $1,000 tacked onto the price of the TV.
I wonder how much of that increase is due to simply the total number of TVs increasing.
Not a problem for me. I went from a 32" CRT to a 100" DLP-RP about a year ago. I'm so anal about bulb replacement that I make sure to turn off the projector when it's not in use. In some of the same situations I might have left my TV on.
Since when do Americans care about power consumption?
I just got an HD tuner box and that thing must suck down the juice - I could fry an egg on it, and it doesn't matter if it's on or off!
Well, some company (I forget who) is coming out with these flexible screens (I can't remember the actual name of them either) that supposedly use less energy than any TV out today. I found the article on MSNtech if anybody cares to take a look. The technology should be out around early next year.
Yea, I'm defintiely thinking that they're trying to scare people/get publicity by looking at the stats for CRT projection TV's. Those things consume comical amounts of power, and they've been around for years. That spiffy new pedestal-type Samsung DLP TV that I just bought? 110 Watts! Thats less than my old, SD Sony CRT Tube TV. Seriously, where the hell are they getting these numbers? I have no idea how they can think that a TV is scanning more lines, that it consumes more power.
In fact, that might be where they get there numbers. Assume that someone's going from 480 to 720p. 720p is 1.5 the rez of 480. multpily the small-screen SD stats and you get 276. Hmm, pretty close to 301 isn't it? Do it for big-screen and you get 468. Even closer than the first, only being 9 kwh/y off. Looks like someone might just be making up numbers here...
#2, make sure you get one of those "premium unleaded fuel only" plasmas when you get it installed!
BTW LCDs like the one I have (in the 27"-32" "small TV range") take 150w-180w max, standby average 3w.
Plasma panels do suck up a lot of power. I used to work at a computer manufacturer that also sold plasma TVs. We had a 50" HD one in our lab for testing Media PCs. You could feel the heat radiate from the panel when it had been on for a while. Sometimes we would put a fireplace screensaver on and tell people that it was so real you could even feel the heat. We put an wattmeter on it and it sucked down about 300 watts on normal pictures and 500W when we put up an all white screen.
I bought a 65" Sony HD XBR RP set a year and a half ago and I think my monthly bill went up like 25.00 a month. I got smart and I never leave the set on standby anymore. It went down considerably after that.
300W * 24 hr/ day * 30 days = 216 kWhr
I pay 8 cents kWHr (Illinois, baby. God bless nuclear power). That's $17.28 per month.
Now, who watches that much TV? If you do, your electric bill is the LEAST of your problems!
Plasma definitely consumes a lot of power - ionizing a gaz at 200 volts fir each pixel is intense. The new Toshiba/Canon SED displays should improve on this considerably. Power consumption was certainly one of the factors in my decision to go for LCD over plasma when I got a 32" Sharp Aquos TV.
Under 40 inches is now considered "small screen"? SOB. I was so proud of my Loewe's Aconda 38" HDTV CRT, supposedly the largest CRT ever made.
There is no way an LCD consumes more electricity than a CRT, so I don't buy this one bit. A 17" LCD monitor consumes around 20 watts, whereas a 17" CRT can burn more than 100 watts. Maybe DLP and plasma consume more wattage, but not LCD.
The point is that 'new' TV's may draw more power than older ones that people are replacing. It is a concern. Dimissing the idea as retarded or pointless is stupid. Car engines are more efficient yet produce more power than they used to. This is what technological advances should include.
That is awful expensive! Based on last months electric bill at 6+ cents per KW (in the Northwest) and the 455 KW a year ‘Extended/High Definition Large Screen’ it will cost me less than 8 cents a day, OUTRAGOUS. I guess I should have calculated what I save in the winter heating bill because the TV is helping warm up the house.
#6 LED backlights still use more power than flourescent lamp backlights. Sooner or later it may be less but not currently, LEDs i'm relatively certain are less efficient then current CCFLs.
#26 Current LED's are roughly as efficient as incandescent bulbs (certain special LED's are closer to fluorescent, but they aren't what's used in LCD backlights). The manufacturers used LED, even though it's LESS efficient than fluorescent, because the "bulb" lasts 100,000 hours, vs. 10,000 hours for fluorescent, or 2000 hours for incandescent, and because it's less sensitive(reliability-wise) to certain types of power fluctuations.
Although LED are improving, it's unlikely that they'll beat fluorescent's 50-75 lumens/watt efficiency anytime soon.
OLED, particularly luminescent OLED, is currently running up to 50 lumens/watt and is expected to reach 100 lumens/watt (matching the best current light source, mercury vapor) in the near future, and may eventually reach as high as 300 lumens/watt. OLED is one of 2 technologies to watch for the next gen of large displays, it's more energy efficient than LCD (the current leader) because it eliminates the need for a backlight, and OLED is roughly as efficient as fluorescent with longer life and less brightness required (an LCD backlight looses about half it's brightness shining through the screen). The other technology to watch is the current "stealth" contender, e-paper (or e-ink), which uses a reflective, rather than emmissive or transmissive, medium, so existing room light provides the display lighting. OLED is getting close, and may be out next year; nobody knows for sure when e-paper will be out, since the developers are being fairly quiet about it, but it has some pretty compelling cost advantages over the alternatives (at least on the manufacture side), so the future may very well look like OLED on the high-end with e-paper(wallpaper displays anyone?) on the low end.
Small screen is defined as smaller than 40" ???
Man ...
What about front-projection HDTV sets? It seems like these would consume the least amount of power since they're just a projector. Just another reason why front-projection is the superior type of HDTV.