What is a kilowatt hour? Understanding home energy use
If you’ve ever taken a glancing look at your electricity money you know you are being billed for kilowatt hours. But what does that mean precisely? A watt is a common unit of measure for electrical power.
So if a watt is a measure of electrical power, what exactly is superpower? Dominance is used to measure the instantaneous electricity being used when you turn on any electrical device. You accompany ability requirements announced out in watts on labeling for everything, from light bulbs to microwaves. Kilo makes one thousand so a kilowatt is 1,000 watts. However, both watts and kilowatts are merely a snapshot of instantaneous electrical usage.
Energy, which is what we really care about, and what the utility firm blames you for, is that amassed amount of strength being used over some reporting period. Energy is expressed in kilowatt-hours. Here’s an analogy that might help simplify the concept. Imagine you are driving a automobile. Your fasted, or pace of tour when you look at the speedometer, be equal of supremacy, or pace of energy consumption. But you know that looking at the speedometer doesn’t tell you anything about how far you’ve gone.
For that, you need to look at your accelerate over the time you’ve been driving. Energy is the equivalent of interval in this analogy. To understand how much vigor you’ve exploited, you need to know how long you’ve been consuming a specific amount of dominance. Energy is power over some period of time.
In small amounts, we weigh intensity in watt-hours. Energy sized for urban households, we appraise in thousands of watt-hours, or kilowatt-hours. Let’s illustrate this with got a couple of samples. A kilowatt-hour is 1,000 watts consumed over 1 hour. If you burned 10 100 watt bulbs for one hour you would use 1 kilowatt-hour of energy.
Or, if you forgot to turn off a single 100 -watt bulb for 10 hours, you would also burn a kilowatt-hour of energy. Taking that last example a pace further, if “you’ve left” that bulb on every day while at work or academy, you would burn 260 kilowatt-hours per year.
At 25 cents per kilowatt-hour, that single bulb left burning each workday would cost you $65 per year. You unquestionably want to turn off all the suns before leaving the house. And switch to low-wattage LED bulbs.
Now you know. Kilowatt-hours are a measure of energy, which is power over day. Your utility statutes you for the vitality, or the energy you spend in kilowatt-hours. Visit our video page at enphase-dot-com-slash-homeowner-videos to learn more..
In small amounts, we weigh intensity in watt-hours. Energy sized for urban households, we appraise in thousands of watt-hours, or kilowatt-hours. Let’s illustrate this with got a couple of samples. A kilowatt-hour is 1,000 watts consumed over 1 hour. If you burned 10 100 watt bulbs for one hour you would use 1 kilowatt-hour of energy.
Or, if you forgot to turn off a single 100 -watt bulb for 10 hours, you would also burn a kilowatt-hour of energy. Taking that last example a pace further, if “you’ve left” that bulb on every day while at work or academy, you would burn 260 kilowatt-hours per year.
At 25 cents per kilowatt-hour, that single bulb left burning each workday would cost you $65 per year. You unquestionably want to turn off all the suns before leaving the house. And switch to low-wattage LED bulbs.
Now you know. Kilowatt-hours are a measure of energy, which is power over day. Your utility statutes you for the vitality, or the energy you spend in kilowatt-hours. Visit our video page at enphase-dot-com-slash-homeowner-videos to learn more..