How To Find The Cost of Running Your PC or Laptop

Want to know how much you shell out daily for running your computer? If you are concerned about the electricity bills and use your computer or laptop for more than 4 hours a day, then this is some thing for you to consider. Most people buy the computer systems without looking into the purpose of the pc and the electricity consumed by the components. But if you would like to know how much your pc is contributing to the monthly electricity bill, then here we go.

#1) The first thing to find out the cost per unit of electricity in your area. You could find it from your last months electricity bill or by checking the website of the electricity company. A simple google will fetch you the desired details.

#2) Now we have to find out the power consumed by various components in your pc. This is usually expressed in kW (kiloWatt). It is not necessary to find the power consumed by the pc components manually. Joulemeter from microsoft will help you find an estimate.

Joulemeter takes the processor, screen brightness, disk usage, run up time etc into account and gives you and estimate of the electricity usage.

Calculating Total Cost Of Running Your PC

Multiply the following to get the cost of running your laptop or pc.

Cost per unit (in kWh) x Power Consumption of your PC (kW) x Number of Hours You Use your PC or Laptop (in hours).

Your pc power consumption will be usually in watts. So don’t forget divide the number by 1000 to convert it to kilowatts if you are manually calculating it. Joulemeter represents the power consumption in kWh under its statistics.

Eg. If you use your computer for 9 hours a day with the pc power consumption being 100watts and the price per unit of electricity is around 3Rs or 10¢. Then the cost of running your pc is calculated as 9 x (100/1000) x 3Rs or 10¢ = 2.7 Rs or 9¢ per day. So, that amounts to 270¢ a month.