TV over usage

As the time for me to take maternity leave approaches I find myself working from home more often. In working from home, sometimes I need a bit of a break or distraction so I'll turn the TV on, often there's nothing in particular I want to watch, or it's a rerun. I see this becoming a more regular habit when the baby's here and I don't have my career related activities to work on and if I don't change my habits.

In addition to the potential for my increased viewing of television, my husband falls asleep in front of the TV every night, and will have it running in the background while working on other stuff just to have some noise. This can amount to the TV running every weeknight for him for 8 hours or more. That's a lot of wasted kilowatts!

So I'm looking for ways to reduce the kilowatt usage, but provide the 'distraction' we seem to need. So I'm investigating these possible solutions:

• Bring the stereo to the main floor, and validate that listening to music for an hour uses less kilowatts than TV for an hour, which works for me during the day because electricity usage is a lot more expensive during the day.
• Research timers appropriate for the TV to make sure hubby doesn't have it on too late into the night because he's fallen asleep again, or to force him to turn it back on in X hours, depending on which option(s) work best for him.
• Research energy saving televisions because we'll be looking to replace one of our 2 TVs in the next year or so.
• Research alternate energy generating sources for high usage items that run during the peak energy usage times.