The corner of the living room with the television, the box that feeds it, a games console and a sound system feels like it ought to be an energy drain, and parts of it are, though not always the parts you expect. The screen itself is usually modest in use; the bigger waste tends to hide in what those devices do when you think they are off.
What a television actually draws
A modern flat television is fairly efficient in use, drawing perhaps several tens to a couple of hundred watts depending mostly on its size and how bright the picture is. A small set sips very little; a very large, very bright one in a dark room can draw noticeably more. Run a few hours an evening, even the larger sets cost a manageable amount over a year, which the running cost calculator will quantify for your own model and viewing. The television is rarely the villain of the electricity bill; it is a steady, middling cost rather than a heavy hitter.
Screen size and brightness
Two things move a television's consumption most: the size of the panel and the brightness setting. A bigger screen has more area to light, so consumption climbs with size. Many televisions also ship in a vivid, retina-searing shop-floor picture mode set far brighter than a normal room needs, which uses more power for a picture that is often less pleasant to watch. Switching to a standard or home picture mode, and turning the backlight down to a comfortable level, trims the running cost and usually improves the viewing. Any automatic brightness or eco setting that dims the panel to suit the room helps too.
The standby trap
Here is where the real waste tends to sit, and it is rarely the television. Games consoles are the prime suspects: left in a connected or instant-on standby so they can download updates and wake quickly, some draw a meaningful amount around the clock, far more than a truly-off device. Set-top boxes and digital recorders are similar, staying half-awake to record and update. Over a year, a console and a recorder idling in these modes can quietly cost more than the television does in active use. A plug-in energy monitor reveals exactly which of your devices are doing this.
Settings that cut the cost
The fixes are mostly free. On a games console, switch off the instant-on or connected standby in its power settings and let it power down fully when you finish, accepting that it takes a little longer to start and updates when you next turn it on. On a television, use the picture and eco settings above. Across the whole cluster, the device-by-device habits matter less than one simple move described next.
The one-switch solution
Rather than hunting through menus or crawling behind the unit each night, put the television, console, sound bar and the rest of the entertainment cluster on a single switched extension lead, and turn the lot off at the wall with one switch when you go to bed. That kills the standby draw of everything in one action, while leaving devices that genuinely need to stay on, like anything that records overnight, on a separate socket. It is the same principle as the wider standby power advice: do not fuss over every gadget, target the cluster that actually wastes power and switch it off together.