Tracking Our Everyday Energy Usage: #2 The Television

For the month of June we decided to monitor how much electricity is used by our television. We used the awesome P3 Kill-A-Watt Wireless to track how much electricity was being consumed by our TV over a three day period.

A typical day of television watching in our household consists of a couple of hours watching the news in the morning and then around 3-5 hours of drama / sports etc., in the evening.
I expected our TV would use a large amount of electricity and wanted to know exactly how much.
For reference, the TV we monitored is a 42″ LCD made by Vizio.
Plugging in the Kill-A-Watt Wireless transmitter was easy;

All we had to do to collect the usage data was sit back and enjoy our favorite television shows for three days, we set about this task with enthusiasm and watched as the data piled up!
We collected a total of 89 hours worth of usage data, this was almost 4 days of monitoring the TV while it was switched on and off.

We were pleasantly surprised by the results!
The Kill-A-Watt Wireless showed that our TV uses just 11 cents per day in electricity, that equates to roughly $40 per year, which isn’t bad at all.

The P3 Kill-A-Watt Wireless also told us that our television uses less than 1 Amp and less than 1000 Watts when in use.

Our quest to track our electricity usage continues, to summarize the results so far;
Electric Kettle (used to boil water for tea and coffee) = $7.45 per year
Television (used for around 5-7 hrs per day) = $40 per year

Our next target for energy monitoring is going to be our trusty refrigerator, check back soon for the results!

If you are interested in buying the Kill-A-Watt Wireless you can visit their store here;
P3 Kill-A-Watt Wireless