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Boiling your kettle, using your washing machine or charging your phone are everyday uses of household electricity, yet we don’t always think about the connection between those activities and what we pay for our electricity use.
We did some research using common household examples to show what a dollar’s worth of electricity use looks like based on a sample of average EnergyAustralia usage costs as of September 2023. * You might be surprised at what’s revealed!
Starting in the kitchen, $1 of electricity could get you:
3 dishwasher cycles, or 51 hours of running your fridge, or boiling your kettle 19 times.
Moving into the family and lounge room, $1 of electricity could get you:
7 months of charging your smart phone, 18 hours of TV time, 67 hours on a laptop or 14 hours on a desktop computer.
In the laundry, $1 could get you 3 washing machine cycles or 1 cycle of your clothes dryer.
Around the house, with your heating, cooling and lighting, for $1 you could get 175 hours’ use of a ceiling fan, around 3 hours of cooling, 2 hours of heating through a split system, 225 hours of LED lighting or 45 hours of incandescent lighting.
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Surprised, or were our findings what you expected? You can download our information sheet as a handy reference and see how we got to these figures:
You can also take some simple steps to help reduce your energy use, such as switching appliances off at the wall when they’re not in use or close doors to unused rooms to reduce the area you need to heat or cool.
*These examples assume a usage charge of 30c/kWh (incl. GST), which is based on a simple average of EnergyAustralia’s peak anytime (flat rate) residential usage tariffs for Flexi Plan in the areas we supply electricity (VIC, NSW, SA, QLD and ACT). Excludes discounts and supply to property charges. Rate is current as of October 2022. Our figures are based on typical new appliances with energy consumption values sourced from energyrating.gov.au/calculator unless otherwise stated. Figures are indicative only and have been rounded to nearest whole number. Actual running costs of your appliances may vary due to factors including age, size and model of the appliance, how it is used, where you live and the tariff(s) you pay for electricity usage. Customers with time-of-use or demand tariffs may be able to take advantage of cheaper rates by using appliances in off-peak periods.