As I mentioned before, my 12 year old TV consumes far less power than I expected. My whole system is rather dated. I was originally going to replace my TV on a 10 year horizon but the widescreen/flatpanel TV market was in such a state of flux a couple of years ago that I decided to wait it out a bit until LCD technology was a bit more mature and the whole widescreen thing was more mainstream and affordable.
I’d say that the past month and a half had fairly typical viewing by Michelle and I. We were out of the country for a few days. We’ve begun using Netflix so our DVD viewing is up a bit. But ups and down on viewing are just a normal part of life.
My total system is as follows:
- Hitachi 50FX19K rear projection TV
- Panasonic DVD-RP62 DVD player
- Hitachi FX-613 VHS VCR
- Phillips DSR708 Tivo
All of this is plugged into an APC BACK UPS ES 725 that keeps everything on an even keel even with Georgia’s terrible electrical power management.
The VCR, while admittedly not exactly the hotspot of the entertainment system was used to watch at least one full length movie while monitoring the energy consumption.
RESULTS
Elapsed time: 1083 hrs (about 45 days)
Measured Minimum Consumption (Watts): 52
Measured Maximum Consumption (Watts): 200
Measured Consumption (Amps): ? <–Sorry forgot to note this.
KWH: 76
Cost –
Actual (for duration of test): $8.05
Daily: $0.17
Weekly: $1.24
Monthly: $5.34
Annual: $65.00
Interesting, but the numbers look ‘strange’ to me, unless you APC Backup EPS is doing some ‘smoothing’ of your power consumption. I’d be interested in seeing what would happen if you plugged your TV directly into Kill A Watt gizmo.
It would also be interesting to see how much your UPS uses with nothing plugged into it.
Hey King, I did that experiment before I went ahead and did the entire system and got no reading at all. I see that the Kill A Watt can be off by as much as 2% when outside the “typical” power consumption ranges. I’m wondering if the unit just blows below “x” Watts.
I tried hooking it up to my space heater which is on a timer. The timer alone also yields no consumption reading but I *know* it must consume something all the time in order to run (it’s a mechanical timer – no batteries).