What does it cost to stay cool this Summer?
It's been pretty warm this week, and with many of us getting our fans out of storage to help keep us cool, especially for the recent muggy nights, you may wonder how much it costs to keep that fan running? For direct debit customers, the Ofgem energy price cap as of April 2024 stands at 24.50p per kwh as the cost of a unit of energy.
To calculate the cost of running your fan, multiply the cost of a unit of energy by the fan's kW output.
If you use a fairly typical 73W box fan, it'll use 0.073 kWh of electricity every hour. So, if you use your fan overnight ( 9 hours) to help you sleep, it'll use around 0.65 kWh per night. Over a week, this is around 4.6kWh of energy usage, at 24.50p per kWh. This means that the fan is costing you about £1.12 to run for the week, which is a pretty reasonable price to pay for a better night's sleep, (I'd happily pay ten times that!)
If you use a desktop fan with rotating blades, it uses a bit more energy. If you run the fan overnight (9 hours), every night, that cost increases to around £1.54 per week, more or less. The bigger the fan, the more power it'll use, but even a bigger 18-inch fan shouldn't cost you more than £2 per week to run.
Over 840,000 households have built-in air conditioning units that consume up to 2.7kW. In a typical week, households use their units for almost three hours, but when temperatures are high, they may well run their air conditioner overnight, and a nine-hour use will send the cost of a good night's sleep soaring to around £42 a week.
Another one million homes have portable air conditioning units that use 1kW of power, which means you can expect to pay around £15.61 a week if you use them for 9 hours a day.
Five tips for keeping cool
Create a cooling breeze: Place a bowl of ice cubes in front of an electric fan to create a refreshing breeze as it blows the ice-cold air around the room. It also helps to have a cool shower before bed, as you go to bed cooler, so it takes less to cool you down.
Close the curtains: Keep your curtains shut during the day. It may be tempting to let the light in, but the sunshine will heat the room, turning your home into a greenhouse.
Unplug the tech: Gadgets plugged into your home, including those on standby, produce heat. Unplug them when you are not using them to keep the room cool.
Take advantage of the daylight: Switch the lights off during the day. Lightbulbs release heat, causing a room to get warmer, so turning them off or switching to LED bulbs that give off less heat can help reduce the overall temperature. With the sun setting late in the evening during summer, you can keep the lights off longer and keep the room cooler.
Use a hot water bottle: You don’t have to use a hot water bottle to keep warm. Instead, you can fill it with cold water to keep you cool at night.
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