Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from houset dot com where smart happens. Hi.
Speaker 1: I'm Marshall Brain with today's question why are my power
Speaker 1: bills so high? Which appliances used the most power? If
Speaker 1: you were to make a chart of the electricity consuming
Speaker 1: devices in a typical American home and rank them in
Speaker 1: order of their hunger for power, the list might look
Speaker 1: something like this. At the top, there would be things
Speaker 1: like heat pumps and central air conditioning. They might consume
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand watts. A water heater or a clothes dryer
Speaker 1: can consume four thousand watts if they're electric. A space
Speaker 1: heater or a hair dryer consumes a thousand or twelve
Speaker 1: hundred wats. A refrigerator might consume seven hundred to a
Speaker 1: thousand watts. A computer and a monitor might consume three
Speaker 1: hundred watts. And then there's compact fluorescent light bulbs, which
Speaker 1: might consume fifteen watts. So if your house has electric heat,
Speaker 1: then the middle of winter is a time when you're
Speaker 1: gonna be using a lot of power. A heat pump
Speaker 1: might run ten to fifteen hours a day. If you
Speaker 1: assume electricity costs a dime per kilowatt hour, you could
Speaker 1: spend twenty dollars a day just to run the heat
Speaker 1: pump over the course of a month. That's several hundred
Speaker 1: dollars worth of electricity. The same applies in the summer
Speaker 1: if you use the air conditioner a lot. Water heating
Speaker 1: uses a good bit of power as well. When you
Speaker 1: take a shower or run a load of clothes in
Speaker 1: the washer, the electric water heater might run for an
Speaker 1: hour reheating the water in the tank. That's forty cents.
Speaker 1: A typical household can burn several dollars a day just
Speaker 1: heating water. Because we don't normally think of it this way,
Speaker 1: it's funny to consider that every shower you take costs
Speaker 1: forty cents. When you add in the cost of washing
Speaker 1: and drying the towels. Every load of clothes that you
Speaker 1: run might cost a dollar or two dollars for washing
Speaker 1: and drying, plus the soap and shampoo you you it
Speaker 1: can cost nearly a buck just to take a shower.
Speaker 1: Refrigeration is another big power drain because the refrigerator can
Speaker 1: easily run for ten hours a day. That's a dollar
Speaker 1: per day just to keep the melt cold. If you
Speaker 1: leave the computer or TV on all day. It can
Speaker 1: add up to a dollar per day as well. Compared
Speaker 1: to these big consumers, compact thruscent light bulbs don't even
Speaker 1: show up on the radar. Using a space heater or
Speaker 1: an electric blanket so that you can turn down the
Speaker 1: furnace at night is probably the easiest way to save
Speaker 1: big on your power bill. Saving hot water is the
Speaker 1: next easiest. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for
Speaker 1: this podcast? If so, please send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on
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Speaker 1: home page.