Does turning a TV off at the mains damage the TV over time?

[FatBaldGuy]

@njtt

However, the PSA advice was to not rely on that switch, but to physically unplug.

I suspect the reasoning behind this is that if your house is struck by lightning, your TV, computer or whatever will be less likely to be damaged if it is completely unplugged from the electrical system. To my mind, that makes sense, but the effort of plugging/unplugging every time I use it is not worth it for the minuscule risk of a lightning strike.

[Patty_O_Furniture]

@muldoonthief

But for modern TVs, the standby usage is very low. My giant-ass Panasonic plasma uses 0.2W in standby, so a full year of standby would be 0.2 * 24 * 365 /1000 = 1.75 kWH, or a whopping 35 cents worth of electricity.

Multiplied by 600,000 people in Boston and that’s over a million kWH. And if all of those people have 8 or 10 devices gently sucking two-tenths of a watt all day long, we start to see some real money being wasted (yes, I know: it’s your money and you’ll use it as you see fit).

Resource-wise, this feels like the “don’t leave your tap running while you brush your teeth” argument. Individually, many of us don’t see a problem with letting a half liter of water go down the drain, but scale that up to a city’s worth of people and the volume becomes significant.

[Bert_Nobbins]

@FatBaldGuy

I suspect the reasoning behind this is that if your house is struck by lightning, your TV, computer or whatever will be less likely to be damaged if it is completely unplugged from the electrical system. To my mind, that makes sense, but the effort of plugging/unplugging every time I use it is not worth it for the minuscule risk of a lightning strike.

Is it a miniscule risk? My sister’s house was struck, destroying every electronic item in it. The house two doors from mine was struck, probably with similar results. (all it did to me was mess up the burglar alarm)

Neither of us live up mountains.

I always unplug the computers from the mains, and disconnect the modem cables when I go away for a few days. And I make sure the plugs are physically distant from the sockets. You know it makes sense.

[GusNSpot]

Dish receiver is always left on unless a BIG storm is near. I really hate to miss one of my shows that does not repeat.

If a big hot strike hist real close, like under ten feet from your house, the EMP will eat a lot of electronics from just the induced volts & currents. Unplugging is not total protection.

Fire, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, thieves, pissed off SO, & others, you have no effective protection from except total removal and much distance.

[muldoonthief]

@Patty_O_Furniture

Multiplied by 600,000 people in Boston and that’s over a million kWH. And if all of those people have 8 or 10 devices gently sucking two-tenths of a watt all day long, we start to see some real money being wasted (yes, I know: it’s your money and you’ll use it as you see fit).

Resource-wise, this feels like the “don’t leave your tap running while you brush your teeth” argument. Individually, many of us don’t see a problem with letting a half liter of water go down the drain, but scale that up to a city’s worth of people and the volume becomes significant.

But it still really doesn’t. And especially when there are easier ways to save significantly more electricity. Hell, if I replace a single 60W bulb with a 13W LED equivalent, I save more than the stupid TV after a meager 38 hours of usage.

And if it does reduce the life of the product by any meaningful amount, all bets are off - how many more TVs do those 600,000 Bostonians have to buy because they all unplugged them every time they turned them off? How much energy was used to build those extra TVs? It’s just like the reusable grocery bag issue - you’ve got to use them some huge number of times before they actually become more environmentally friendly than the plastic bags.

[FluffyBob]

@usedtobe

If you plug your TV into the outlet controlled by a wall switch (a common feature in cheap houses, where the builder wants a “light switch”, but doesn’t want to pay for wiring and installing a fixture), that switch will do exactly the same as the C/B.

This is not done as some sort of (ridiculous) money saving trick and has nothing to do with cheap builders. A ceiling light fixture is a minuscule addition to the lighting budget of a builder, and nobody pays more/less for a house because there is or isn’t one more switch on the wall.

It is simply done so there is an option to control floor lamps with a wall switch. Floor lamps are standard equipment for a living room, so here is a switch to turn them on as you enter a room, if you wish. It is also sometimes done for master bedrooms. It is standard practice to put them in the electrical plans of the blue prints, you don’t even ask for them it just happens.

[Canadjun]

@FluffyBob

It is simply done so there is an option to control floor lamps with a wall switch. Floor lamps are standard equipment for a living room, so here is a switch to turn them on as you enter a room, if you wish. It is also sometimes done for master bedrooms. It is standard practice to put them in the electrical plans of the blue prints, you don’t even ask for them it just happens.

I absolutely agree. It is d–n difficult to physically turn off a lamp in the corner of my living room at the lamp itself because furniture is in the way. So, I turn it on and off at the wall switch.