Appliance running cost calculator
Work out what an appliance costs per use, per week and per year, including standby. Compare two appliances side by side.
Tumble dryer uses about 587 kWh a year running, which costs £143.81.
What this assumes
- The appliance draws its rated power the whole time it is running.
- Your unit rate stays the same all year.
- Appliances that heat — washing machines, dishwashers, ovens, kettles — draw their full rated power only while the element is on, which may be a few minutes of a long cycle. For those, this figure is an upper bound. A plug-in energy monitor measures the real one.
Compare it with another appliance
Not enough to go on yet
Not enough has been entered to draw a conclusion. Guessing from this would produce a confident answer that happened to be wrong, which is worse than no answer.
Confidence Low — this is a starting point, not a finding. More information would change it.
What we do not know
- Any usage or cost figures at all. Nothing can be said about a bill without something to work from.
What to do
Everything worth doing here is free.
Send a real meter reading
There is not enough to go on yet, so start with what costs nothing.
If your bill says "estimated", it is a guess based on what the supplier thinks you used — and estimates drift. Submitting an actual reading replaces the guess and rebills the period against it. This is the first thing to do when a bill looks wrong, because until it is done nobody knows whether the bill is wrong or the estimate is.
- Reduces how much energy you use
- Do it now
- Free
- Evidence: moderate
How to tell if it worked: Read your meter before the change and again a week later, at the same time of day, and compare the two weeks.
The most useful next check
Find your annual usage in kWh
Your bill or online account states it. With that figure the calculators here become a check on your own bill rather than an estimate.
Worked out by energy rules 1.1.0. Nothing you entered leaves your browser.
The calculation
Power in kilowatts, multiplied by hours, gives kilowatt hours. Multiply that by your unit rate and you have the cost. A 2.5 kW dryer running an hour and a half uses 3.75 kWh, which at 24.5p is about 92p a cycle.
Why the rating on the plate overstates it
Anything that heats and then holds a temperature — a washing machine, a dishwasher, an oven, a kettle refilling — draws its full rated power only while the element is actually on. On a two-hour wash cycle that may be fifteen minutes.
So for those appliances, treat the figure here as an upper bound rather than an answer. A plug-in energy monitor measures the real one, and the gap is often a factor of two or more. Motors, lighting and electronics are far closer to their rating, so the calculation is reliable for those.
Standby is charged for the hours it is not running
This is where the surprises are. A modern television on standby costs pennies a year. A games console left in rest mode, an old set-top box, or a desktop sleeping rather than shut down can each be £15 to £30 — and because standby is charged for all the hours the thing is not in use, it matters most for appliances you rarely touch.
If you want to find the ones that matter without measuring each individually, the overnight base load reading described on the energy hub catches everything at once.
Why the presets are ranges
A 9 kg heat-pump tumble dryer and a 7 kg vented one differ by a factor of three. An electric oven ranges from 1.5 to 3.5 kW. Publishing a single figure per category would produce a confident annual cost that is wrong for most people reading it, so each preset shows the range for its category and fills in a mid-range figure you should replace with the rating from your own appliance.
The rating is on a plate on the back or inside the door, and in the manual. It is usually given in watts.
One thing that is not true
All electric heaters are equally efficient. A 2 kW oil-filled radiator, a 2 kW fan heater and a 2 kW halogen heater all turn the same electricity into the same heat and cost exactly the same to run. Where they differ is how quickly and where they deliver it, not how much they use. Claims that one type is cheaper to run than another at the same wattage are not correct.
Once you know what individual appliances cost, the electricity cost calculator puts them in the context of the whole bill.