Appliance FAQs

You can use our appliance calculator to estimate the monthly and annual costs of using appliances in your home.

To manually calculate the amount of kilowatt-hours, you need 3 pieces of information.

First, look at the name plate on the appliance. You are looking for a number with a “W” beside it. This stands for wattage. Some appliances provide the amperage (A) and voltage (V) in place of the wattage. To get wattage, simply multiply amps times volts. An example is a 120 V heater rated at 12.5 amps. This equals 1500 watts.

Now to determine kilowatt-hours, you need to take the length of time (in hours) an appliance operates. Take watts and multiply by the hours of operation. Using our heater example above we have 1500 watts times the number of hours of use. If we use that heater for 2 hours we have 3000 watt-hours of electricity used.

To convert watt-hours to kilowatt-hours you must divide by 1000. Therefore, our 1500-watt heater operating for two hours used 3 kilowatt-hours.

To find your monthly cost to operate each appliance, multiply the total kilowatt-hours used by the current energy rate (approximately 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh)).

For example, if you have an appliance that uses 3 kWh per month and an energy rate of 11 cent per kWh the cost would be 33 cents per month.

You can also use our appliance calculator to estimate the monthly and annual costs of using appliances in your home.