Electric bill myths dispelled

Monday Jul 18th 2005

A little over a month ago I bought an air conditioner. It’s a small one, either 5,000 or 7,000 BTU’s.. not sure. Probably 5,000. On average, I run the A/C somewhere between four to six hours a day. It gets turned off at night. Using an average number of five hours a day, this means I ran it for about 150 hours for the month.

The electric bill came in today. The cost for about 150 hours of A/C use on 110 volt? Seven bucks, or roughly 23.3 cents a day. I had projected that the bill would probably be fifteen bucks higher, but it was less than half of that. That was nice.

This proves a few things. First of all, a singer smaller air conditioners will not put your electric bill through the roof. Secondly, judging by the math I just did, I could run the A/C unit a whole lot longer and still not get whacked too hard on the bill.

If five hours a day of A/C use is 23.3 cents, then that means 24 hours (a full day) of A/C use would be $1.12 a day (rounded). Times that by thirty days and the total would be $33.60 for the month. Obviously I am not going to run my A/C 24 hours a day because it would kill the unit from being overworked - no doubt about that. However, if I ran the A/C for ten hours a day instead of five, the cost would still be under fifteen bucks a month.

So to all out there who are not buying an A/C unit because they think their electric bill will soar, think again. It’s not as expensive as you think. It wasn’t for me.

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