Why are my power bills so high?

When it comes to energy usage, heating and cooling appliances contribute the most to your power bill. Tune in to find out which appliances are the most power-hungry -- and why -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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

(00:20):
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

(00:42):
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

(01:04):
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

(01:24):
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

(01:48):
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

(02:11):
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

(02:31):
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

(02:52):
home page.