Power Consumption

How much electricity do you use? I mean, how much do all your various gadgets and appliances use? I recently came across this blog on kill-a-watt, where he measures how much power various devices use, like his HDTV, lamp, blow dryer, etc.  Since I’m into saving the planet and I like to geek out - I figured I should investigate.  I now have 3 (buy a new kill-a-watt), I i figure i should do the same.

First off, let’s ballpark how much power we use. PG&E (electric company for SF) shows how much power (Kilowatt/hours) is used per day, on average, with every monthly bill. Our “Kwh per day” in september was 7.5, in December it was 18.9 (bad electric heating). And it comes out to about 12 cents per Kwh, so thats about $1 to $3 per day in electricity. As a side note, half of that money goes to getting the power to your house (transmission and distribution) - makes locally installed solar panels seem quite attractive. To the numbers …
Now here’s some standard stuff, in kwh used, averaged over (x) number of hours.

• 0.95 kwh - 1999 Toaster Oven, Toasting, $80
• 0.68 kwh - Holmes 1500W Heater Fan, highest setting
• 0.27 kwh - 300W Halogen lamp
• 0.10 kwh - 2007 40″ Sony Bravia HDTV
• 0.075 kwh - 75-watt incandescent bulb
• 0.020 kwh - 23-watt CFL bulb
• 0.035 kwh - 2007 Refrigerator, $500 new
• 0.005 kwh - 2001 Cambridge Soundworks Model Twelve Portable Stereo

Here’s some Geek stuff

• 0.073 kwh - 2001 Windows PC
• 0.054 kwh - 2007 LCD 24″ monitor, Samsung 245T
• 0.046 kwh - 2005 Buffalo Terastation 1TB
• 0.024 kwh - 2006 15″ macbook pro