How do you know which elettronic appliances impacts more heavily on your elettricity bill? For example a pc, airfryer, rice cooker, air con.
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If you know the correct equations you can work it out by looking at the wattage of the appliance
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You can look at the wattage. Electricity is measured in kWh, which stands for kilowatt hours. A kWh is defined as the electricity used by a device drawing a kilowatt of power, running for an hour.
Check out the wattage of your appliances, then determine how long you ran them for.
Of those, it’s certainly the air conditioner.
Nearly every appliance has a plate on it somewhere that tells you how much power they use in watts and or amps.
Simplified, Watts = amps x volts and Amps = watts / volts if you need to convert. In the US, volts is nearly always 120. For some very large appliances, it is sometimes 240. This will usually be electric heat, central a/c units (and some window units), electric ranges, dryers, welders, hot tubs, etc.
Larger numbers for either watts or amps = more power. For example 1000 watts is more power than 500 watts.
Other than reading the plate on the appliance, it is possible to actually measure the amount of power a device is drawing. Devices that plug in in between the appliance and the receptacle, devices that are connected inside your electrical panel, or a basic multimeter could all be used to accurately measure the power being used.
As I did in the very first sentence, generalizations can also be used to infer which appliance draws the most power – this is based simply on knowledge of what these appliances use on average.
There are devices (my husband has one) that can measure how much electricity an appliance draws.
Look at wattage of your devices, for a PC not doing heavy tasks its 300-350 watts ie 0.3-0.35 kW
The rest will be more or less as rated.
Now multiply this number by number of hours used. You’ll get your unit electricity usage in kWh.
The amp draw from anything with a heating element is gonna be high, but the one that’s the highest is microwaves.
Amp draws from most things in the house is 0.5 to 1-1.5, but heating elements in tank water heaters, dryers, electric ovens, cooktops, air fryers, kettles is about 6-8 amps, and microwaves are 14 amps. Microwaves need to energize a transformer that sends 4k volts to the magnetron, the thing making the waves that excite the water molecules fast enough to heat the contents in the cavity.
The reason that elements are A. So prevalent in modern appliances and B. So hard on electric bills is because elements are relatively cheap, and how an element heats is by inducing an electrical short along the element, but the element is built to handle the load, so it just gets hotter than shit instead of popping like a filament in a lightbulb.
For anything which plugs into the wall you can buy a fairly cheap Kilowatt Meter that you plug in first then plug the thing into it, to measure how much power the thing is actually using. They often let you put in the price for a unit of electricity, and then show you an estimate of cost while the thing is powered on.
Other people are suggesting looking at the device’s rating in Watts which is useful to get an idea, but that rating tells you the maximum power the thing could draw; most of the time it will be using less. e.g. I measured a 2,000 Watt induction hob cooker, and it uses below 200W keeping a saucepan of potatoes boiling. What impacts your bill depends on the settings you use things at, how long you use them each time, and how often you use them. Best way to find out: measure things.
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