Energy saving vs viewing pleasure

by Tom Hughes in At home on 11.08.08

A struggle which has lasted the better part of two decades was recently resolved in my household.

Wearily, and with heavy hearts, my parents agreed to join the 21st Century - and from mid-August they will have access to considerably more than the four TV channels they have enjoyed since the early 80s.

Possibly more exciting than this: to capitalise on their digital TV sea change they decided, almost on a whim, to buy a new LCD TV.

This should be easy, we thought. Get on the internet, check a few prices and do a bit of research, then essentially head straight out to the nearest retail park for the full nightmare consumer experience, where, crucially, we could get our hands on something straight away.

We built the new stand and carted the outgoing grey leviathan of a CRT TV into the garage. Then, with trembling hands, we lifted out our black bundle of joy and hoisted it onto its perch, whence it gazed down regally. Naturally, we watched all evening, and it was fantastic.

But when we came to turn it off for the night we were confused. Having been used to putting our old TV on standby, and then pressing the dirty great big button on the front to turn the machine fully off, we were initially stumped.

The standby police were alerted. Sleek stylishness = no buttons. No “off”, as such. Was energy duty-bound to course through its veins all the time?

My mother has been on something of a purge around the house in recent times, ruthlessly cutting any unnecessary use of electricity. Was our new TV a power-guzzling beast which would have to be physically restrained and unplugged from the wall to stop it gorging overnight?

It stands to reason that the bigger the TV, the more power it uses. However, LCD sets are meant to use at least 25% less juice than a similarly sized plasma TV, and be more efficient still compared to CRTs, so we have made the green choice. Haven’t we?

The Energy Saving Trust recommends TVs should use less than 2 Watts when left on standby, which isn’t a great deal, really. The manufacturer of our new one says that it uses a mere 1W on standby. However, according to carbonfootprint.com, a big LCD TV (37in plus) will use upwards of 200W when it is being viewed.

The manufacturer of our new pride and joy reckons it uses exactly that when displaying glorious, lifelike pictures. Surprisingly, carbonfootprint reckons an old-style CRT TV of the same size would use less electricity than our brand-new one.

Viewing or standby: it all adds up over a year - to around 50kg of CO2 if used for 6 hours a day. And TVs are getting bigger all the time. We’ll make very sure we unplug at night.

IMAGE: by Flickr user saidunsaids?