Interesting Home Entertainment considerations.

Big Screen TV

While the cost of buying a large-screen TV has come down, the cost of owning and operating one continues to grow.

Increasingly, TVs have turned into the center of a personalized home entertainment system that includes digital music, photographs and home theater. They are also morphing into heavy energy consumers right before our eyes.

“The overarching trend we’re seeing in home energy use is the emergence of a miscellaneous category of energy consumption,” said Andrew Fanara, team leader for Energy Star products at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1980, Fanara said, 18 percent of a household’s total energy load was for energy used beyond heating, air conditioning, hot water and major appliances like refrigerators and washer-dryers. Today, the total is 28 percent, with home electronics (which include computers and stereos as well as TVs) accounting for 13 percent of the average electric bill.

By 2015, barring some major efficiency innovations or consumer conservation efforts, the total miscellaneous category is expected to top one-third of the total household electricity usage, and consumer electronics is expected to reach 18 percent, the same amount houses currently use for lighting, Fanara said.

In a recent survey, 40 percent of people said they would rather watch a movie on DVD at home than go out to a cineplex to see it on “the big screen.” Part of the reason is the exponential growth in the size of the TV screen itself.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which commissioned one of the few recent comprehensive studies of the issue, estimates U.S. TVs in 2004 consumed 46 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity – about 4 percent of total home electric use. The number is expected to rise to 70 billion kWh by 2009.

TVs are also being kept on for more hours of the day. In addition to increased programming on cable and satellite services, large TVs have become popular for watching movies and playing video games.

As a rule of thumb, the amount of electricity a television draws is directly proportional to the size of the screen. For a given technology and brand, a 60-inch display will consume about three times as much energy as a 20-inch model.

Preliminary NRDC studies, conducted by Ecos Consulting in Colorado, showed TVs with cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) to be the most efficient on average. TVs with plasma screens use the most energy. But data also show a great deal of variation from one manufacturer to another.

“We don’t have a consistent test method or way to measure this stuff,” said Noah Horowitz of NRDC in San Francisco. “The test method that exists in the U.S. is for black-and-white TVs, so it’s completely outdated.”

Large-screen projection sets have been around for a long time. But new technologies, notably liquid crystal display (LCD) and plasma screens, along with high-definition broadcasts that improve image detail, have facilitated growths in screen size to epic proportions.

Higher definition, which requires more line scans, also contributes to increasing energy demand. Another factor is the number of boxes that people are plugging into their TVs: tuners for cable and satellite broadcasts, high-definition converters, as well as Xbox, Play Station and Nintendo consoles all draw power from wall sockets – even, thanks to “instant-on” technology, when no one is actively using the devices.

“If you add in speakers, the stereo system, the DVD player, the DVR, essentially you’re adding another refrigerator to your home,” Fanara said. “That’s about 500 kilowatt hours a year.”

Typically when a family buys a new, larger TV for the living room, they do not dispose of the older set but rather move it into another room for additional uses. The amount of energy the combined systems take can total 1,200 kWh per year - equal to as much as 10 percent of a household’s total electric bill.

Horowitz and Fanara agreed there is no consistently available information on how much energy a specific model of TV monitor will use per year. “Right now you can buy an Energy Star television, but the spec is based solely on when the product’s not in use,” Fanara said.

According to NRDC’s report, TVs with the best Energy Star ratings based on “stand-by” mode performance may use more electricity than lower-rated sets when they are being watched.

Said Fanara: “We’re trying to come up with a standard way to measure energy consumed so that we can derive from that an Energy Star specification for televisions which incorporates how the product is actually used.”

If you add in speakers, the stereo system, the DVD player, the DVR, essentially you’re adding another refrigerator to your home.

Source: NW Energy News & Analysis