Electricity usage (and costs) of common household appliances

[trinityEon]

My computer's stay on 24hours. Ofcourse the monitors goes into standby when not in use, but the towers stay on, the routers stay on. Wonder what that costs...

Minus the Reboot times if it is windows... LOL, but interesting question, would it not be determined by adding up the wattage of the PC power supplies?

[Paul_S]

Running a standard desktop PC or gaming PC 24/7 can push up the electricity bill quite a bit.
That's why I'm planning to buy one of those very low power computers like the Fit PC2 which uses less than 10W of power but is still a full blown x86 platform. Slap on Linux and it can download from the Internet or run applications all day and night without running up the electricity bill much. When I get home I can fire up the gaming rig for a couple of hours and switch it off when I'm done.
The low power PC is also capable of HD output so it can double up as a Home Theatre PC - no need to switch it off.
It will also double up as a SAN device that backs up all the data from my desktop PC in the case of theft or a disk crash. (SAN will be bolted to the wall in obscure location)

Some of the gaming rigs with monster graphics cards use a lot of power even in their "resting" (2D) state so it's a waste leaving them running if they're only going to download torrents/nzbs/rapidshare/etc. most of the time.

Average number of hours per month: 730
Basic price of electricity in Tshwane: 74.2 cents/kWh

Low power PC using 10W of power 24/7
10W * 730 hours = 7.3 kWh
Cost: 7.3kWh * 74.2 cents/kWh = R 5.42 / month

Gaming rig using 200W of power 24/7
200W * 730 hours = 146 kWh
Cost: 146kWh * 74.2 cents/kWh = R 108.33 / month

[Canafrican]

With the new Eskom hikes, that looks like a pretty cheap bill! Be interesting to see what the bills come to now and how they compare. Anyone have an current information on this?

[HateTelkom]

I'm on prepaid electricity and use to get 119 units per R100....am now getting 94 units after 1 July and the price increase...approx 25% increase

[Pieter @ 4 Seasons Solar]

The majority of geysers has a 3000watt element, so the heating cost is a bit higher. The solar geysers has a 2000watt element though.

[Pieter @ 4 Seasons Solar]

There is still more Eskom hikes to come, but not yet announced

[Hot_Chocolate]

digging up an old thread here, sorry. But I was wondering if anyone could please tell me what the current price per unit is? or of a link that shows common household appliances' usage. I have only been able to find outdated ones. Thanks

[ettubrute]

Don't know whether Pretoria has something similar, but here are the tariffs in Cape Town.

[Drunkard #1]

Jo'burg

and Ekurhuleni

[DrYes]

Anyone knows if I will be able to heat up a 200LT geyser with a 5.5kva generator with nothing else connected to it.
The mathematics tells me that I can.

[dadiggle]

My electricity is around R100 p.m
I got a meter box in the kitchen

[Pietleeu]

Anyone knows if I will be able to heat up a 200LT geyser with a 5.5kva generator with nothing else connected to it.
The mathematics tells me that I can.

kva and watts is the same thing...kva stands for kilo volt amps....that is 1000 x volts x amps. So a 5.5kva genny is 5500 watts should be able to run a 3000 watts element( found on 200lt geyser or smaller ). Once you go 250lt or bigger you get to a 4000 watt element and im not sure if the initial load (the spike when switched on) is above the 5.5kw range. The other thing to considder is, will the amount of petrol you use to run the geyser for 2 or 3 hours be cheaper than 2 or 3 hours worth of electricity at R1.00 per kwh?

[Pietleeu]

To work out what you will need to run your house off Solar PV Power you can use this calculator

https://www.dropbox.com/s/591aynrr2a...c%20MASTER.xls

[Milano]

Caution: Resurrection in progress.

The first page of this thread has various links to average appliance operating costs in 2008. Any 2013 data available for people like myself who are calculator-challenged, googleless and lazy? Pwwetty pls?