A/V television questions: Is this behavior harmful?

To me, it sounds like the switch is a way to save power. Normal TVs are always on and using power, even in the “off” state. This power is used for several things, one of which is listening for the remote to tell the TV to turn on. The switch seems to turn this functionality off, saving power.

As for the question, turning off the switch should have the same effect as unplugging the television. In the short term, I do not see why there would be any harmful effects to the TV. However, I cannot be sure of this, so here is what I suggest: If you are going to be watching more tv that day, it is okay leave the switch on, because it doesn’t use a large amount of power. You should turn the switch off overnight and any time you won’t be watching more TV for several hours. More than ⅓ of a day * 365 days = a lot of time (over 100 days).

I agree with @PhiNotPi. I doubt it will hurt anything. But the savings are going to be minimal. Like flipping the switch for 8 hours will save as much electricity as it takes to watch the TV for 15 seconds.

Now back in the olden days my husband’s parents friends (already this is sounding like an urban myth but I will continue…) had a old TV in their bedroom. It would have been a tube not flatscreen and no remote control back then either. Anyway (I’ll get there…) they had it plugged in to the wall beside their bed and the TV was placed a little way off – too far to reach without getting out of bed. After they finished watching it at night they would just flick the switch on the wall socket. The TV broke very quickly and the repair person said it was because they didn’t use the button on the TV to switch it off.

But I think that you will find that the standby button on the remote and the power down button on the TV are both up to the task of turning off the TV without worry. Just don’t turn it off at the wall without powering off first.

What does the instruction manual say?

The problem is that I just flip the switch to turn the TV off, G/F says that I should turn it off first THEN flip the switch. Is that harmful to the tv?

I don’t think so but i would follow the GF’s instructions – it is her TV and she may have read the manual.

My Mom had a big screen that, if you did what you are saying, would lose its memory for Sound.
Each time there was a power outage, my Mom would have to pay $150 to have a repair man reload the software.