What It CostsHeating, Cooling & Air Running Costs
Anything that moves heat is where the bill is won or lost. These five are the biggest numbers in most homes.
Electricity cost calculator
Any appliance, any country — watts and hours in, money out.
Air purifier running cost
The electricity is cheap. The filters are the bill.
Fan running cost
A whole night for less than a penny an hour — with one catch.
Air conditioner running cost
The summer line on the bill, per hour and per season.
Dehumidifier running cost
A small draw that runs for months — which is the whole problem.
Heat pump running cost
The same warmth for a third of the electricity — until it gets very cold.
Space heater running cost
Every 1,500 W heater costs the same. Only the hours differ.
If you only ever check one group of appliances, check this one. In a typical home, heating, cooling and hot water account for more of the bill than everything else added together — and they are also the appliances people are least likely to have measured, because they run in the background and nobody switches them on deliberately.
The tools here take the same two inputs as everything else on the site, but the numbers they produce are an order of magnitude larger. A television is pennies a day. A space heater in January is the reason the bill doubled.
Frequently asked questions
Why is heating so much more expensive than everything else?
Because making heat needs orders of magnitude more energy than making light or sound. A television turns 90 W into a picture; a space heater turns 1,500 W into warmth and needs every one of them. That is why a single electric heater run through a winter costs more than every screen in the house put together.
Is a heat pump really cheaper than an electric heater?
Yes, by a factor of two and a half to three and a half. A resistance heater turns one unit of electricity into one unit of heat — it cannot do better. A heat pump moves heat from outside rather than making it, so one unit of electricity delivers two and a half to three and a half units of heat. Same warmth, a third of the bill.
Does a thermostat change the running cost?
It changes the hours, which is the same thing. A 1,500 W heater with a thermostat in a well-insulated room may only run half the time once the room is warm, so the honest input is running hours rather than hours switched on. A plug-in energy monitor settles the argument for the price of a takeaway.
Which is cheaper, a fan or air conditioning?
A fan, by a factor of fifteen. A pedestal fan is 20 to 100 W against 900 W for a window air conditioner, and air movement is worth about 4 °F of perceived cooling. On a warm-but-not-hot day the fan does the job for pennies; on a genuinely hot one it does not replace cooling, but it does let the thermostat sit higher.
How we calculate this
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