LED Wall - leave powered 24/7?

[Stuart91]

One of the venues that I work in has an LED wall. There's a bit of debate about how best to handle the power to it. 

My normal instinct is to power it down when not in use - I figure it's silly to add runtime to things like fans, and I've no idea what effect there is on the LEDs themselves. "Black" is clearly not the same as "off" even at minimum brightness.

However, there's apparently an instruction from the supplier that the wall should be left powered up 24/7. I'm not sure what the reasoning for this could be. Are they worried about PSUs dying on power-up?

The wall clearly isn't IP rated. The brand name doesn't show up on Google, and the power inlets and outlets are both blue coloured Powercon connectors. (To give a rough approximation of the quality here) It didn't come direct from China, but through a UK supplier who appear to do a mixture of rental and sales. 

My experience of different LED models is quite limited. Does anyone else know if the 24/7 power is a standard procedure?

[Peter F]

If it was outdoors there's a good argument for leaving it powered up to avoid condensation building up overnight inside the panels / PSU's.
Indoors, less so. Some of the older panels were so unreliable that once you had got them working you were loath to turn them off again, along with keeping your fingers crossed that they would last a show. 

Cheers,

Peter

[Pete McCrea]

It could also be around reliability of the sending and receiving cards and whether they hold their mapping correctly after a power cycle. We’ve had issues with screens that for what ever reason after a power cycle you’ll have to resend the wire map and/or rcfg file, so needing a semi skilled person to get it running again. At that point we’d leave the screen on. 

[Stuart91]

14 hours ago, Pete McCrea said:

We’ve had issues with screens that for what ever reason after a power cycle you’ll have to resend the wire map and/or rcfg file,

I'm a novice when it comes to the send / receive cards, however it appears that the wall can organise itself, we've had to take it down a couple of times and the pieces have been rearranged in more or less random order with no ill effects.  

14 hours ago, Pete McCrea said:

 needing a semi skilled person to get it running again. 

Well, given that I've been called into this place because somebody can't plug in an HDMI cable...

 

I'm quite happy to leave it running if that makes sense, just wanting to make sure I'm not leaving them open to bigger and more expensive problems appearing a little earlier than would otherwise be the case. 

[GR1]

I would ask the supplier why they instruct that the wall is left on 24/7.

[Jivemaster]

There may be a trade off between power consumed, life consumed and power up heartache to be reviewed. 

I remember seeing some discharge lamped projectors in a school hall being powered up but shuttered for the summer recess which probably approximates to one lamp life.