Money Moral Dilemma: Should I ask guests to keep their energy use down?

Cardew

Voyager2002 wrote: »

There is a serious issue, obscured by the stupidity of the question...

Overnight guests do use utilities and increase household bills, although recharging mobile devices does not have a measurable impact on these. A considerate guest would, for example, ask whether the internet is on an unlimited data contract before downloading entertainment, and would perhaps contribute to the increases in the water bill that they may have caused. The cost of this kind of contribution would still be very much less than that of a hotel room.

The convention used to be that the overnight guest would take her/his hosts out for a restaurant meal as a kind of repayment for their extra expenses, but sometimes this is not how people choose to spend their time.

We are talking about Guests NOT 'paying guests'; so your analogy with a hotel room cost is irrelevant.

Offering to 'contribute to water costs'? Are you serious!

Moon_Keh

Cardew wrote: »

We are talking about Guests NOT 'paying guests'; so your analogy with a hotel room cost is irrelevant.

Offering to 'contribute to water costs'? Are you serious!

I've just asked and one of our cats would be only too pleased to help

Mouseboy007

How much do you pay per KwH?
Let's assume you're on a horrific tariff and paying waaay over the odds at 20p per KwH!

And lets assume that the devices that are being plugged in are mainly technology devices such as tablets, phones, and laptop.

An average phone/tablet charger is usually rated - at the maximum - at around 5volts, 2.5amps. So that's 12.5watts of power.

A laptop charger could go as high as perhaps 19.5volts and 7amps. So that's 136.5watts of power. Many are around half of that. And that's peak power consumption.

Worst case you have 2x VERY power hungry laptops consuming 273watts power that are maxing out the power consumption by running HD video continuously, rather than being in standby etc, and similarly 8x devices that are consuming 100watts of power between them. That means you're seeing a spike of 373watts per hour. So in 2.6hours, you'll consume 1kilowatt.

Let's assume they are using your facilities for 12hours solid at maximum power draw using our worst case scenario of costs and appliances. In 12hours, they will have used 4.6Kwh, or 92pence of electricity.

A more likely scenario is they're using under half of that power-draw (so 186watts per hour), perhaps for only half of the hours in total (although it may be plugged in for more than 6hrs, laptops will likely be in standby and phones will have charged by then and draw less - so 6hrs total use/charge time) and your electricity charges are probably also half or better (so 10p per KwH).

That translates to 1Kw being consumed in 5.3hours, so with a runtime of 6hrs giving a total of just over 1kw, which as mentioned will probably be around 10p.

Long story short, you're probably looking at being between 10p and 92p worse off. And even 10p is most likely well overestimated. Unless of course as a previous poster mentioned they're using large heaters and perhaps the odd convection oven .....