Portfolio of my Knowledge... » appliances http://fany.savina.net A great big online folder containing what I have learnt while being home-schooled. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:32:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Consuming Electricity (Experiment) http://fany.savina.net/2010/02/consuming-electricity-experiment/ http://fany.savina.net/2010/02/consuming-electricity-experiment/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:17:16 +0000 Fany Savina http://fany.savina.net/?p=808 As a sort of experiment, I decided to see how much certain appliances in my house cost my parents. At first, as a control, I unplugged everything and I even switched off the fridge. This is to prevent another thing … Continue reading →

]]> As a sort of experiment, I decided to see how much certain appliances in my house cost my parents. At first, as a control, I unplugged everything and I even switched off the fridge. This is to prevent another thing consuming electricity and compromising the results. On my list of appliances was: 1) the electric kettle, 2) the toaster, 3) all the integrated lights turned on, 4) the projector, sound system, and blu-ray player, (everything needed to watch a movie). I tried each one individually, switching them off as I was finished with them to make sure the next appliance was the only thing consuming. The way I got my results was that I timed myself for one minute and counted how many times I saw the red line (black in my case) on the rotating piece of metal under the numbers indicating the watts consumed. I tried each appliance three times to make sure I got an average and here is what the results looked like:

Here is an average of the rotations:

On the electric meter, it was indicated that 187.5 revolutions (rotations of the line) was equal to 1 kilo watt. This means that if the line revolved 187 and a half times, the numbers on top would be bigger by one unit. To find out how many watts were used in only one turn, I did a simple 3 rule. 1000 watts is equal to 1 kilo watt.

\frac{1000w}{187.5}=5.3w per turn

And then, I calculated how much each appliance used in watts by multiplying the number of watts per rotation with the number of turns I counted for the appliances..

Kettle= 9*5.3=47.7w

Toaster= 5*5.3=41.5w

Lights= 2*5.3=10.6w

Projector and Co.= 2*5.3=10.6w

I then went on to find out how much it cost money-wise. On a recent electricity bill, I saw the price at:

14.10 cents per kilo watt.

The problem was that my previous calculations weren't in kilo watts but in watts. Once I had the watts, I had to simply divide by 1000 to convert them to kilo watts, and multiply by the price (14.10 cents) and then convert the price to euros (divide by 100).
Here is a table with the appliance, the number of watts consumed, and the price:

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