Powering up a large quantity of monitors

Thread Starter

Man_in_UK

Joined May 13, 2008
180
Long ago I was told that powering up a large bank of 32 monitors all at the same time was bad for the monitors. Is it true?

On the odd occasion when we had a power cut or someone had turned off the wrong circuit breaker, all our 32 Wells Gardner 27" CRT monitors would get powered up together. Quite often this would cause one of them to fail and my old boss would once again claim .... "You should never power them on at the same time".

He never came up with a scientific reason for this but I have always done my best to follow his advise.

My question. Is this true and is it still relevant with todays modern monitors?
 

dl324

Joined Mar 30, 2015
16,839
On the odd occasion when we had a power cut or someone had turned off the wrong circuit breaker, all our 32 Wells Gardner 27" CRT monitors would get powered up together. Quite often this would cause one of them to fail and my old boss would once again claim .... "You should never power them on at the same time".
That sounds like BS to me.
Is this true and is it still relevant with todays modern monitors?
Are you still using CRT monitors? LCD's use much less power and the only issue with turning on large numbers at the same time is the load they put on the electrical circuit.
 

Thread Starter

Man_in_UK

Joined May 13, 2008
180
Are you still using CRT monitors?
Not anymore.
The subject has come up because a building that uses 26 modern LCD monitors of only 3 years old have started getting failures. 3 in the last 3 months. These monitors are connected to a contactor that powers them all off at the end of each day and all on again each morning.
 

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,157
Not anymore.
The subject has come up because a building that uses 26 modern LCD monitors of only 3 years old have started getting failures. 3 in the last 3 months. These monitors are connected to a contactor that powers them all off at the end of each day and all on again each morning.
The power on/off cycles can be stressful especially if the monitors are subjected to thermal cycling as well. Do they also turn off the heat where the monitors are located? If your power management strategy is fixed by higher powers, you may just have to live with periodic replacement. Most monitors can be configured to consume very low power when not in use, and you might be able to show that leaving them "on" but "hibernating" could be a viable alternative.
 

ronsimpson

Joined Oct 7, 2019
2,985
LCD monitors of only 3 years old have started getting failures.
You could easy have that problem if the monitors were powered separately. "3 years old"
Color CRT monitors have a very large current at start up. (degaussing coil) Powering up several CRT monitors could pop the breaker.
 

Lo_volt

Joined Apr 3, 2014
316
My guess is that 3 years may be the shortest nominal lifetime of these monitors. I'd expect that you'll see more fail over the next few months. You're at 11.5% failure rate. That seems high and my suspicions go toward product quality rather than power on sequence.
 

MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,706
From personal experience, electronic equipment last longer if you leave the power on 24/7.
They go bad very often after a major power outage.
 

djsfantasi

Joined Apr 11, 2010
9,156
So, create a system that powers on the monitors in sequence or sequentially in a group.

if you knew the protocol used in a smart plug, a microprocessor could detect a power failure and control the power sequence over a network.

This has been done with Arduino and Alexa already. Here are several projects that do this.
 
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