Earth Week is a good time to look at what we all can do to help our planet. Often times, helping the planet also helps our pocket books! Take a moment to look at what is probably the most used piece of electronics in your home: The TV.
If you don’t need to buy a TV now, there are several things you can do to reduce how much energy you use watching TV:
1. Watch TV with a DVR. A digital video recorder allows you to record your favorite shows onto a hard drive. By doing this, you can watch your favorite TV shows and fast forward through the commercials. For every 30 minutes of programming on TV, there are 10 minutes of commercials. By fast forwarding through commercials, you can immediately cut how long your TV is on by 33%!
2. Do you fall asleep with the TV on in your bedroom? Most TVs have a sleep timer. Start using it when you go to bed and you’ll see a couple of benefits. First, the TV won’t wake you up at four in the morning when someone selling a Snuggy starts talking waaaay too loud. Second, you’ll eliminate the hours your TV is on when no one is actually watching it.
3. Check to see if your TV has a power saving mode. Many brands have included this feature lately. It reduces the brightness and power consumption of your TV. Turning it on makes the picture a little less bright, but the benefit is that the picture is often more realistic and has better depth.
4. Try and limit the number of TVs on at any given time. Watch TV as a family instead of everyone watching in different rooms. If you’ve got a family of four all watching four different TVs, only watching one TV cuts your energy consumption by 75%!
5 And, of course, there is the ever unpopular watch less TV! Maybe go outside and hug a few trees instead!
If you do need to buy a TV now, you should definitely check out the Sony environmental set or the Samsung LED sets. Those use the least power of any TV out there.
Happy energy savings, all!
By Tim S.
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