Stop appliance genocide

[Nick_the_'Nole]

Plasmas are terrible for power consumption... you don't even have to hook up a meter to one to tell that much, just stand about 3 feet away and you can feel the heat off 'em.

LCDs aren't that great either... and some of the fancy "eco" LED ones actually draw more power than comparable CCFL-backlit units. The 42" Hitachi LED unit we have here pulls about 130W on a pretty low brightness setting.

OTOH, I picked up a 2004-ish 52" CRT rear-projection HDTV off the side of the road a year or so ago, and fixed it up for a friend. Out of curiosity I hooked it up to the Kill-A-Watt and could hardly believe the reading I got... it was something like 65W.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Nick_the_'Nole

LCDs aren't that great either... and some of the fancy "eco" LED ones actually draw more power than comparable CCFL-backlit units. The 42" Hitachi LED unit we have here pulls about 130W on a pretty low brightness setting.

My Insignia 19e720a12 19" LED-LCD flat panel draws 25 watts when operating, under one watt in standby, and is Energy Star certified, according to its specifications in the instruction manual.

The new flat screens with LED backlights should draw much less current than the earlier ones with CCFL backlighting. Of course, the larger screen sets will draw more current, even using LEDs as backlights. I have read here of some very large flat screens that draw upwards of 500 watts; someone mentioned in a post recently here at VK a flat screen that drew 580 watts (!) in normal operation. Much of that may well be due to the power source for the backlight (CCFL[s]) -- again, the larger the lamp (or the number of lamps), the more current will be required to operate them. My best guess is that 80 percent of the power draw of a modern large-screen flat panel TV is the power supply for the backlights, since there are no power-hogging tubes in the TV chassis or electron beams in the panel itself. Home theater setups with 1kW, 5.1(or more)-channel surround sound and a large TV, however, are a different story. These can and often do draw well upwards of 500 watts, and will drive the owner's energy bill sky high if he or she (or his or her family) watches a lot of TV and/or listens to the sound system for hours at a time. I can also envision a set like miniman82's DLP drawing 500+ watts, due to the arc lamp and its hefty power supply.