Do You Know How Much It Costs to Charge Your Phone in a Year?

Ever wondered how much you are spending to boot your devices up? Here’s how much it costs to charge your gadgets.

Do you get panic attacks when you find your phone dead without a single percentage of charge? I’ve seen people lose their minds, until they plug in the charger of their gadgets and wait for the brand name to boot up on the screen.

With the rapid increase in usage of electronic devices and gadgets, chargers and consequently electricity is a necessity and not a luxury. According to the Internet & Mobile Association of India and KANTAR-IMRB, India will see almost 500 million rural and urban mobile phone users. The numbers for other gadgets aren’t small either.

Smartwatches, laptop, tablets and portable sound systems have also become a part of people’s everyday routine and to keep them running, they need to be continuously fed with electrical power.

Do we ever wonder how much are we spending to boot these devices up? Should we be worried about the same? I’ll let you decide.

How Much Electricity Do These Gadgets Consume?

So how much electricity do these gadgets really consume?

Let’s take an example of an iPhone. An average Apple USB adapter is rated at 5W while charging. This means if you charge your phone for an hour, it should take 0.005 kWH of electricity. So, it consumes 2 units of electricity annually and if you take an average cost of electricity as Rs 5 per unit, it costs only Rs 10 to charge your iPhone in a year!

Let’s take another example. A 15-inch laptop charger is generally rated somewhere between 60W to 90W and if your laptop takes two hours to reach full charge from empty, it consumes between 0.12 units to 0.18 units of electricity. So, it costs between Rs 220 to Rs 330 to charge your laptop in a year. (The cost per unit of electricity varies with state, source of energy and other factors.)

For those who do not know, to calculate energy consumption, you need to simply multiply the unit’s wattage by the number of hours it has been consumed.

In the below cases, we have taken into consideration the amount of electricity the devices consume to charge fully and not hours of consumption. Since 1 kW is equal to 1,000 watts, to calculate the kWh consumption, we simply divide it by 1,000 which is then multiplied by the number of hours and then with the number of days.

We finally multiply the same with the average cost per unit, which varies from state to state.

You can run all your favourite gadgets for under Rs 200 worth of electricity a year with no regret! According to the Government of India's Bureau of Energy Efficiency, a refrigerator with 250L capacity consumes 501 units of electricity annually running 24 hours daily. Which means the cost is almost a hundred times more that of your pocket device!

But do you unplug your devices soon after it’s fully charged? Or are you among those who keep it plugged in overnight?

Fun fact: Even after your device gets fully charged, it still pulls about 2-4 W of electricity to maintain its charged state. That little trickle of electricity is actually wasted. If everyone unplugged their devices once they are fully charged, one could save a significant bit of electricity.