What Every Appliance in Your House Actually Costs to Run

The dehumidifier. US households that run one use 999 kWh a year — more than every refrigerator in the house combined at 839 kWh, and more than the average clothes dryer at 680. It is a compressor running for a thousand-plus hours a season with none of the visibility of an air conditioner.

About 2,000 kWh a year, and almost none of it is from using it. EIA's metered survey gives 1,963 kWh (1,479 heater plus 484 pumps); California's Title 20 standby formula independently gives 2,134 kWh for a typical 400-gallon spa. That is more than twice the electricity of every fridge in the house.

Enormously — 17 to 84 times cheaper per hour. Certified 52-inch fans draw 10.5 to 29.1 watts on high; ENERGY STAR window air conditioners draw 500 to 1,890. But a fan cools people, not air. The Department of Energy's guidance is that a ceiling fan lets you raise the thermostat about 4°F with no loss of comfort — it is a partner to air conditioning, not a replacement for it.

Almost none. EU law caps a charger's no-load draw at 0.10 watts, which is about 0.9 kWh a year — a fraction of a penny a week if you never unplugged it once. The things worth unplugging are not phone chargers.

The cable or satellite box. UK metering of 132 real boxes found an average of 14.1 watts, and Sky boxes 18.9, essentially unchanged whether on or off — because they never truly switch off. Around 79% of a set-top box's annual electricity is standby, against about 1.5% for the television it is connected to.

No, they use more. Compared at the same screen size across 175 certified models, a 65-inch OLED averages 236 kWh a year against 185 for a 65-inch LCD — 28% higher. At 55 inches the gap is 37%. EU regulators granted OLED displays a relaxed correction factor in Regulation 2019/2021, which is a tacit acknowledgement of the same thing.

Barely, and sometimes not at all. A certified 2.0 cu ft mini fridge uses 249 kWh a year — essentially the same as a 10 cu ft full-size top-freezer at 263 — because compacts use cheaper compressors and have far worse insulation relative to their volume. A second mini fridge in the garage is one of the least efficient things in a home.

Yes. Certified US heat pump dryers use 208 to 281 kWh a year against 608 for a conventional vented electric dryer — a saving of 54 to 66%. In the EU the same gap appears as 1.0 kWh per cycle against 2.7. It is the largest single efficiency gap in this entire dataset.

Because they measure different things. The US dishwasher figure includes the energy to heat the incoming water; the EU figure is cold-fill and machine-electricity only. US dryer figures assume 283 cycles a year, EU figures 107. EU televisions are declared in kWh per 1,000 hours rather than per year, and EU portable air conditioners per 60 minutes. We keep the rows separate rather than blending them into a single misleading number.

Mostly from us, and we say so on every row. Neither the US nor the EU regime publishes appliance power — both rate energy per cycle or per year. So the running watts for refrigeration, laundry, dishwashers and air conditioning are derived from certified annual kWh and tagged D. Where a regulator does publish watts, as ENERGY STAR does for ceiling fans and the UK survey does for metered devices, the row is tagged M.

Work out the extra kilowatt-hours first, then check four things that no appliance table can see: whether the previous reading was estimated and this one actual, whether a fixed-rate tariff ended, whether the standing charge changed, and whether the billing period was simply longer. If all four are unchanged, the extra kWh are real usage. Only then does the appliance list matter, and the useful question is which appliance is large enough to account for the gap. For scale, a 300 kWh jump in a month is roughly what an electric storage water heater uses in that time, and about twenty-two years of a laptop's annual consumption.

Almost never, and the numbers say so plainly. A phone charger left plugged in with nothing attached uses about 0.9 kWh a year. A laptop's test-metric figure is 13.81 kWh a year. Whole-household standby in the UK measures 201 kWh a year, about 5.1% of all household electricity. If your bill rose by 300 kWh in a month, every standby load in the house combined cannot account for it. The tool on this page sorts appliances into what can and cannot explain your specific gap for exactly this reason.

Solar generates in the middle of the day; several of the largest loads in this table do not run then. A set-top box draws about 14.1 W with no true off state and a satellite box about 18.9 W, all night, every night. Refrigerators and freezers run around the clock. Standing charges apply whether you generate anything or not. And export rates are usually far below the import rate, so exporting a kilowatt-hour at midday and buying one back at 8 pm is not a wash. We publish the always-on figures because they are the ones solar cannot cover.