- Can we continue enjoying all the options that our television offers us and save energy?
- There are different ways to optimize energy use in our home and save a few dollars monthly.
- This is ideal when we have several televisions in the home, especially if we have children.
It is possible to make our television use less energy , but should we do it? We are going to see all the ways in which we can reduce the amount of energy our television uses, the disadvantages of doing so, several useful tricks, we will analyze if it is really worth it and several ways to save energy without our experience being affected..
Previously, we told you how much electricity can be consumed by leaving the TV on all the time, which can be a notable amount. Today we will see several tricks to save as much as possible and make the electricity bill a little “thinner”.
Settings to make my TV use less energy
There are several ways to make our television use less energy by configuring one option or another, both while it is on and in standby mode..
Obviously, not all televisions will have the options that we are going to analyze below, although if the one we have at home has even a few accounts, it would not be a bad idea to put them into practice.
Enabling eco mode will make the TV use less energy
This will depend on the design of our television, the ecological mode can dim the screen or it can massively change many energy saving settings which we will talk about a little further down. This mode will depend on the television..
So if we need some power saving tips or tricks, we'll have to find out what eco mode does on our server, see if it's available, and if it does more than just dim the screen.
Dim the screen
If our television does not have an ecological mode, we can dim the screen manually to better match the ambient light of the room where we are. There are several televisions that have an ambient light sensor, something similar to phones that adapt depending on where we are and the brightness of the light. The idea is to make the TV brighter during the day and dim at night, when the room is known to be darker.
Enable auto power off and sleep mode
Many of us fall asleep while watching television, it is the best time to use sleep mode. There is nothing wrong with falling asleep with background noise, perhaps a YouTube video or a program that we like. But there is no point in having the TV on for hours and hours at night if no one is enjoying it.
The children are another factor, we call them for a snack and they don't even bother to turn off the television, they just leave it on. The auto-off feature will turn off the TV after we spend a certain number of minutes without interacting with it.
Disable network and streaming function
A huge amount of standby power is wasted to keep the TV ready to accept input or turn on at a moment's notice. If we have a smart TV to which we can stream music and videos, it is possible that the TV uses an abnormal amount of energy to always remain ready to turn on and display streamed content.
If we are not using that function, even any other, perhaps because we have Apple TV, Roku or another streaming device, we can reduce energy use by disabling these functions and network connectivity. Let's think about it for a second, why are we going to use 8W of idle power 24/7 for a function we don't even use?
Should I do it? Is saving energy worth it?
Personally, we all agree that if we can modify some options that do not affect the quality of our experience when watching our television, it is totally worth it.
Let's consider a few things. When we switch to eco mode and dim the screen, we can make the image look dirty and faded, right? When we do this, we save approximately 15 W of charging power. Let's pretend that we watch 3 hours of television a day. At the average U.S. energy price of 12 cents per kWh, watching TV in eco mode with the screen dimmed year-round will save us two dollars annually.
So, unless our power went out and we have backup power, trying to make it last as long as possible, it is not worth losing so much quality to save so little energy.
Now the situation changes when we deactivate all the functions that we are not using. Depending on the functions and the television, we can save about $15 annually. And if we activate sleep mode so that the TV does not stay on during the night when we fall asleep, this would represent $10.50 annually (approximately).