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