CRT Monitor Power Usage

Several times I had observed that my laptop battery lasts a lot longer if I turn down the brightness of the screen. That just seems such a common sense thing to do. But I never took power consumption of monitor that seriously till one day I almost burned my hands while trying to move the big bulky 19 inch CRT monitor. The back side of the monitor was really hot.

Boy, how much power does this one consume? A quick look at the manual and turns out that my old big bulky 19” monitor was consuming a whopping 120 Watts. It’s like having a big bright bulb burning right in your face. That figure was big enough for me to switch off my monitor while not working. But still I wondered, what is the exact relation between what is being showed on screen and how much power is being consumed by the monitor.

A really good EBay deal on P4400 KillAWatt by P3 International convinced me that God wants me to buy a power meter and investigate this in detail. For anyone interested in “watching your power”, this is a handy thing for about $30.

I ventured onto this study. I checked monitor power consumption for CRT (Cathode Ray Tube aka big, bulky, heavy, TV shaped, ugly, dinosaurs), as well as LCD monitors (Liquid Crystal Display aka thin , flat, light, cool cuties) . Since 17” monitors are the most common, I chose Compaq S710 in my office (which is CRT 17”) and Hundai Imagequest L70N, which is LCD 17” monitor for study and comparison.

I checked following things

• CRT monitor consumption vis-à-vis LCD monitor consumption
• Brightness settings varied 0, 50, 100
• Contrast settings varied 0, 50,100
• Screen background changed black, gray, white
• Soft power off (off using power settings of computer) and hard power off (off using switch) consumptions.