iPad Costs Just $1.50 a Year in Electricity

Unplug that cellphone, turn off that iPad and turn down the laptop screen brightness, because all those energy hogging gadgets are costing you….a lot less than you think, according to Electric Power Research Institute figures.

In fact if you fully drain and recharge your iPad every other day, it will use just 12 kWh of energy per year, costing you $1.50, reports Forbes.

Similarly, after fully charging and draining your cellphone for 365 days, your vocal chords may be strained and you may have developed carpal tunnel syndrome from all the texting, but you will have spent just 25 cents on electricity.

An average laptop uses about 72 kWh a year, costing a whopping $8 over the course of a year, meaning you can run an Apple iPad, iPhone and laptop for less than $10 a year, Forbes reports.

But before you go and begin wantonly turning on every appliance in the house, not all out creature comforts come so cheap. A big screen plasma TV will cost the average person about $45 a year to run. Using it for videogames? Then tack on an additional $40 for that brand new Xbox One.

But the most prosaic electrical goods seem to be the real energy hogs. That 60 watt incandescent lightbulb is costing you $26 per year; multiply that by however many you have in your house and the cost soon adds up. An LED bulb, by contrast, costs just $4.40 a year to run.

By far the biggest electricity cost in a home is its heating and cooling. The average American household spends thousands of dollars a year on HVAC, Forbes reports. Indeed, heating and cooling account for about 40 percent of an average home’s electricity use over the course of a year.