Real Simple magazine just published a small article titled High Tech's Hidden Cost, which details annual power consumption for several electronic devices. Here are the TVs (all measured are < 40" in size, "kWh" = kilowatt hours):

It looks like they're using $0.109 per kWh as their price (divide the numbers and you'll see) ... though it remains ambiguous how long they assume each device will be on for each year. You might be able to figure that out by getting power consumption data for each device, e.g.: from a CNET article:

• Average plasma: 358 watts
• Average rear-projection: 212 watts
• Average LCD: 220 watts

Working with the plasma numbers, you need to watch 2.793 hours of TV to use 1kWh (1000w/kw) / (358w/hour). So if we've used 441kWh for the year, that's (441kwH * 2.793hours) = 1231 hours total, or 3.37 hours/day, which seems pretty reasonable I guess.

(Disclaimer: I don't own a TV).

1. A small problem arises when we work "up" to the LCD annual cost: ( 1231 hours/year * 220 watts/hour * 1kw/1000w ) = 270 kwH, for an annual cost of $29.51 ... which is way off from their reported number of $8.42. I think maybe they confused "CRT" with "LCD", which gets the number closer, but it's still off by a lot.
2. Another small problem is that the average household time spent watching TV is more like 8 hours, 14 minutes. If we apply some corrected numbers:
   • Average daily TV: 8.25 hours (yearly: 3011 hours)
   • LCD power consumption: 220w
   • CRT TV consumption: 100w (123 kwH / 1231 hours/year * 1000w/kwh)

   ... the chart looks like so:

   Item	Power consumption	Avg. annual energy use (in kWh)	Annual cost
   Plasma TV	358w	1,078	$117
   LCD TV	220w	663	$72
   CRT TV	100w	301	$32

At any rate, I was a lot more interested in the home networking numbers. I have a handful of devices that are always on, and so I was curious as to what I was paying for these. The list looks like so:

• One network storage appliance (NSA), 49w of power on idle
• One server
• One 100mbit switch
• One firewall
• One ADSL Modem

Also, I have a couple of laptops that are on approx 25% of the time:

• laptop #1 (37w on load, 21w on idle, use 29w avg)
• laptop #2

Total: $117/year, or $9.77/month

That's a whole lot more than I would have expected.

Interestingly enough, the power to run my entire network is the exact same as watching a plasma screen TeeVee for 8 hours, 14 minutes per day.

If this is true, it makes a shared hosting plan look pretty good, as you can get them beginning at $6/month, and you don't have to pay for the hardware.