electricity costs calculator

cathybird

Hi all

Forgive me if anyone's started a thread on this recently but this electricity costs calculator gives you a useful way to break down your electricity bill because you can work out roughly what each of your appliances is costing you.

http://www.ukpower.co.uk/running-costs-elec.asp

You just need to know the appliance's wattage (which is often recorded somewhere on it and if not you can usually find it out by looking up the item on google. I have a Prima glass kettle and looked up "prima kettles wattage" on google and immediately found it on ciao.co.uk with the wattage listed as 2000).

Then you need to work out what your electricity supplier is charging you per Kilowatt Hour. This should be on your bill. I use Ecotricity & they charge £0.1326p per KWhr (ie 13.26p). (The rate goes down after the first 900 KWhrs but my brain started hurting at that point so I just used the basic figure).

Then you need to work out how many hours use that appliance each month. If you were going to be really anal you could keep a daily diary but otherwise just guess roughly. The online calculator averages kettle use at 8hrs a month so I went with that.

When I put those figures in to the calculator it works out that my kettle use chews up £2.12 worth of electricity per month. But 8 hours might be an underestimate since if I'm heating water for cooking I often use the kettle to do that, so it probably costs me more. I probably do need to keep some kind of record to arrive at a really accurate figure.

It's interesting because you think your bigger items cost you more than your smaller items but that ain't necessarily true. The kettle is probably one of the most expensive items you have. As I say mine uses 2000W to power itself whereas my telly uses 48W, less than some lightbulbs (it's a pathetically small telly and my boyfriend really wants me to get a bigger one)...

Anyway, I worked out that if I substitited the low energy lightbulbs I've had sitting round in a box for over a year with the ordinary lightbulbs in all my lamps I'd shave roughly £4 off my electricity bill! So I straight away went and did that.

I plan to go through every single appliance in the house and work out what they cost me. I think I worked out the computer costs 9p an hour to run so sitting for hours posting on MSE is somewhere between reasonably priced and not very MSE!!

If anyone's a complete techie and is reading this going "no no no no that's all wrong" please do reply & say so – I'm no expert with electricity, I just thought this website might help.

debbycatz

cathybird wrote:

Hi all

Forgive me if anyone's started a thread on this recently but this electricity costs calculator gives you a useful way to break down your electricity bill because you can work out roughly what each of your appliances is costing you.

http://www.ukpower.co.uk/running-costs-elec.asp

.

Thanks for this Cathy - I was wondering if there was something out there like this 'cos my electric bill always seems so high ! Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if I could work out what was using the electric up.

Like you, I tend to boil the kettle for washing pots up but I'm wondering if it would make more sense to pop the immersion heater on for half an hour or so a day to avoid constantly boiling the kettle

Just wondering if you posted this on the Gas and Electric boards too as they might find it helpful - sorry if you have already done that

Thanks again

cathybird

debbycatz wrote:

Just wondering if you posted this on the Gas and Electric boards too as they might find it helpful - sorry if you have already done that

Thanks again

didn't think of posting it on the Gas & Electric boards at all!!!! ... will do that now, thanks...

jessicamb

Cathy I posted a link to this thread in the 'use less gas/electric' thread on the OS board - hope you dont mind.

Cardew

Cathybird,
Whilst I applaud your motives your calculations are a long way out in some respects.
Firstly you cannot use the 900 units(kWh) tariff to price everything. That is the Tier 1 price and only applies to the first 225 units per quarter, after that you get electricity considerably cheaper on Tier 2. A reasonable figure to use would be 10p for a kWh.

Secondly many devices/appliances have a maximum wattage rating but are thermostatically controlled so are only on for a fraction of the time, so the running costs will be much lower. A typical example is a washing machine. Mine is rated at 3,000 watts(3 kW) . A normal wash takes, say, 1.5 hours. So using the calculator it would appear to be 3kW x 1.5 hours = 4.5 kWh. However that 3 kW rating is because of the heater, and as the heater is only on for a little while it only used a fraction of 4.5 kWh. In fact most wash cycles on my machine use 0.6 kWh or 0.9 kWh.

With a computer most have power units rated at between 350 and 750 watts. However that power is never needed and even modern powerful PCs ,that use far more power than older machines, rarely use more than 150 watts. Thus the average cost of running a desktop PC is around 1p per hour and much less for a laptop.

cathybird

well thank you Cardew!! that's why I mentioned that if anyone more techie came along & understood more about how these things work it would be useful if they would say so.

so would you rate this online calculator useful yourself?? taking into consideration what you've just said about how to work these things out...

Cardew

cathybird wrote:

well thank you Cardew!! that's why I mentioned that if anyone more techie came along & understood more about how these things work it would be useful if they would say so.

so would you rate this online calculator useful yourself?? taking into consideration what you've just said about how to work these things out...

Cathybird,
I hate to sound negative, but frankly not very useful.

To use it you have to understand some electricity basics, and if you understand basics you really don’t need one of these calculators.

To be fair it is fine for something like a bulb or TV that use the same amount of power all the time it is switched on. However the majority of items that use most of our electricity are on a thermostat(ie they switch on and off automatically all the time) or only use a fraction of their maximum rated power. This applies to Electric cookers, washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, freezers, immersion heaters, electric showers, computers, microwaves, fan heaters etc etc; so for these the calculator is of no use.

Let me give you a really extreme example: My Electric cooker has 2 ovens, a grill, 4 electric hobs(rings) and a warming plate. If you look at the plate on the back it will give the rating as 15 kW. The calculator you gave would calculate this would use 15 kWh and cost it at £1.50 an hour at 10p a kWh.

Indeed if you switched everything on full, for the first few minutes it would use 15 kW. Then after a few minutes as everything reached its operating temperature the hobs, ovens and grill would keep switching on and off. So it would be impossible to work out how much electricity it would be using.(without sophisticated measuring equipment) Using, say, one oven on a medium temperature and a couple of hobs which would be normal for most people might use as little as 2 kWh in an hour.

Sorry:o

Mike_St_Helens

Anyone know how much it costs to stay on bl0ody DFW day and night 7 days a week?

I cant get away from it !

Jolaaled

Does anyone know the average Wattage for Fridges/Freezers??

Google won't tell me.

thanks

cathybird

I'll investigate this apparently complicated issue further with my electricity supplier and get back to you all ...

Jolaaled

I found this website, which looks like it's got some useful tips.

http://www.whatyoucando.co.uk/electricity_reduction_story