# Running a screen 24 hours a day, 365 days a year > Four things wear out when a screen never goes off: the panel, the warranty, the electricity meter and the connection. Here is the arithmetic for each one, and the hours worth not running. Source: https://channelos.tv/academy/run-a-screen-24-7 Published: 2026-10-29 Track: Make it run itself Lesson 3 of 4 Plan: Free plan Author: The ChannelOS team **Yes, a TV can be left on 24/7. LED, LCD and QLED panels light the picture from behind rather than pixel by pixel, so they do not burn in. OLED is the exception, and it should not hold a bright static logo or price strip in one place for months. Consumer sets are specified for roughly 6 to 8 hours a day against a commercial panel's 16 to 24, so your own manual and warranty are the authority, and the cheapest hour is the one nobody sees.** --- ## The short version, in 5 steps 1. Find the panel's power draw in watts, on the label on its back or in the manual. 2. Multiply the watts by the hours you run it, then divide by 1000, for kilowatt hours a day. 3. Multiply that by 365 for the year. 4. Multiply by the rate on your own electricity bill, per kilowatt hour. 5. Run the same sum for a shorter day, and the difference is what the dark hours are worth. --- The board went up on Tuesday and it has not been off since. You pass it on the way to lock up, still lit at eleven at night with nobody in the room, and the question arrives: is leaving it on going to wreck the telly? It is a fair question, and it is four questions wearing one coat with four different answers. **Yes, a TV can be left on 24 hours a day. Whether it should be comes down to which panel is on your wall, how many hours its manufacturer specified it for, and whether anybody is in the room at 3am to look at it.** ## Will a TV get burn-in from a menu board? Signage is the worst case for burn-in: a board can hold the same logo in the same pixels for hours. **OLED is the panel type to worry about, and more or less the only one.** Each pixel on an OLED makes its own light and ages as it is used, so a bright element parked in one place for months wears that patch faster than the rest and leaves a ghost of itself. LED, LCD and QLED panels light the whole picture from behind and do not age that way. They dim over years, but evenly, which is not what burn-in means. If you are buying rather than using the TV you have, [which TV to buy for signage](/blog/how-to-turn-your-tv-into-digital-signage) argues it out. The fix is motion and change, and a slideshow is already both. What matters is what sits still **across** slides: three boards cycling is fine, but a header bar in the same corner of all three, in the same bright colour, every day for a year, is static whether or not the slides change under it. So on an OLED keep more than one slide, and do not park a white block or a saturated logo in the identical corner of each. The case worth avoiding is one board held all day with nothing changing on it, which loses readers as fast as it wears pixels: [how many slides a board should have](/academy/three-slides-not-thirty) does that arithmetic. One static element you do not control is ours. A free screen carries a ChannelOS banner along the bottom, and about every two minutes that banner opens into a full ChannelOS slide for roughly 30 seconds, naming what ChannelOS is and the channelos.tv address, then folds back. Around the clock that is about thirty raises an hour, through the night as well, and the banner sits in one place throughout. On an LED, LCD or QLED panel that costs you nothing. On an OLED it is one more reason to pay it off: any paid plan removes both, from $5 per screen per month billed annually. ## How many hours a day is my TV actually built for? Consumer televisions are specified for domestic use, which in practice is something like 6 to 8 hours a day. Commercial displays from the same manufacturers are built and warranted for 16 or 24, run brighter, and officially support being hung sideways. Do not take a figure off this page for your set. The panel's manual and its warranty terms are the authority, and they differ by model and by market. Running a consumer TV 18 hours a day is a choice with a shorter life attached, and quite possibly a warranty that no longer applies. It can still be the cheaper buy: a consumer set is often cheap enough to replace twice before a commercial panel of the same size pays for itself. A budget decision, not a correctness one. ## How much electricity does a screen on all day use? Nobody can tell you from here: it is your panel and your tariff. The sum is short enough to do at the counter. Watts, times hours, divided by 1000, gives kilowatt hours. Multiply by days, then by the rate on your bill. Worked through with two clearly assumed numbers, **a panel assumed at 75 W and electricity assumed at 20 cents a kilowatt hour**: - 24 hours a day is 1.8 kWh a day, 657 kWh a year, about **$131 a year**. - 12 hours a day is 0.9 kWh a day, 328 kWh a year, about **$66 a year**. So on those assumptions the overnight half of a 24-hour day is worth about $66 per screen per year, and both figures are made of those assumptions alone. Substitute yours: the wattage is on the panel label, the rate is on your bill. Two caveats. The rated figure is a maximum rather than what the set typically pulls, so your real number is usually lower. And brightness is the biggest lever: a screen turned up for a sunlit window costs more than one in a corridor. ![A wall-mounted TV playing a signage show, with no media player box attached to it](/shots/player.webp) ## What keeps the screen going when nobody is there? This is the half that is ours. Screens poll for new builds and reload themselves, and they accept a remote reload from the Display Board, so a screen that has been up for five weeks is not quietly running a five-week-old build. What it shows is worked out from the show plus the channel in real time, so there is no nightly sync job that can fail at 4am and leave yesterday on the glass. A screen that is already playing keeps playing if the wifi drops. It holds the show's pictures and clips in the browser's own storage, so they are not re-fetched every loop and a wobbly connection is not a black screen. **A power cut is the honest exception.** When the screen starts again it fetches the page and the show fresh, so it needs the connection back before it can come up. Two things have to go right afterwards, and the other is the TV: whether yours returns to its last input or sits in standby decides if somebody has to press a button. [Getting a screen back by itself after a power cut](/academy/after-a-power-cut) covers both halves. ## Should I turn the screen off at night? If nobody is in the room, yes. It is the only one of these four variables you control completely, it cuts the running cost in proportion to the hours, and it ends any static element sitting in one place overnight. Three ways to do it, and they stop different things: 1. **The panel's own on and off timer, or a mains plug timer.** The only one that actually stops the panel drawing power. Free, works on every plan, and has nothing to do with us. 2. **Blank from the Display Board**, one tap per screen. That stops the picture, but on an LED or LCD the backlight stays lit, so it saves very little electricity. It does end the burn-in half for those hours. 3. **A channel with nothing booked overnight**, so the dark hours are simply hours with no show airing. [Dayparting a day](/academy/dayparting-a-day) builds a timeline that way, block by block. Channels start on the Solo plan, so this route is the one that costs something. If the screen faces the street and the lit window is the point, keep it on. That is the one case where the overnight hours are the hours doing the work. ## When this is the wrong answer **If the screen has to ride out a long outage on its own, buy hardware.** A player box with local storage keeps playing from its own copy with no connection at all. We do not, and where the internet is genuinely unreliable that is a real reason to spend money on a different vendor. **If an OLED is already on the wall and the board has to be one fixed layout, no setting fixes that.** Either the board moves or the panel is wrong for the job. Software cannot stop a pixel wearing where the light is. **And if the screen is outdoors, in direct sun, or in a 24-hour lobby, that is a panel decision.** Brightness, duty cycle and an enclosure are things you buy, not things you configure, and no signage software changes that. Go and look at two numbers: the wattage on the panel label, and the hours its manual says it was built for. They decide more than anything in the app does. Then, if nobody is in front of it at 2am, put a timer on it. ## Frequently asked questions ### Can a TV be left on 24/7? Physically yes. The two costs are the duty cycle the manufacturer specified (consumer sets are typically rated for something like 6 to 8 hours a day, commercial panels for 16 or 24) and the electricity, which is watts times hours divided by 1000, times your own tariff. Neither is a reason not to do it. Both are reasons to check the manual before assuming the warranty covers it. ### Will a TV get burn-in from digital signage? On an OLED, a bright static element held in the same pixels for months can leave a ghost of itself, and signage is the worst case for that. On LED, LCD and QLED panels the light comes from behind the picture and they do not age that way. A multi-slide show is already most of the fix on any panel: what matters is whether anything bright sits still across every slide, like a logo or a header bar in the same corner all year. ### How much electricity does a digital sign use? Work it out rather than trust a number off a web page, because it depends on your panel and your tariff. Watts times hours divided by 1000 is kilowatt hours. As a worked example only, a panel assumed at 75 W run 24 hours a day is 1.8 kWh a day and about 657 kWh a year, so at an assumed 20 cents a kilowatt hour it is roughly $131 a year. Halve the hours and you halve that. Substitute your own two numbers. ### Do I need a commercial display for 24/7? Not to make it work. A consumer TV with a usable browser will run a board all day and all night. A commercial display is built and warranted for 16 to 24 hours, runs brighter for a sunlit window, and officially supports portrait mounting, so it earns its price in a 24-hour lobby, a shop window or a portrait totem. Elsewhere a consumer set is often cheap enough to replace twice before a commercial panel pays for itself. ### Should I turn the screen off at night? If nobody is in the room, yes. It is the only one of these four variables you fully control, it cuts the running cost in proportion to the hours, and it also ends any static element sitting in one place overnight. Only the panel's own on and off timer, or a mains plug timer, actually stops it drawing power. Blanking the picture from the board stops the picture, not the backlight. ## Next lesson [How to put one urgent message on every screen, then get the schedule back](https://channelos.tv/academy/live-takeover) ## Further reading - https://channelos.tv/blog/how-to-turn-your-tv-into-digital-signage - https://channelos.tv/blog/digital-signage-player-do-you-need-one - https://channelos.tv/blog/android-tv-digital-signage-app The whole curriculum: https://channelos.tv/academy and https://channelos.tv/academy.md