View All News. Outage Map Get information on current power outages Are you prepared for an outage? Know what to do In case of an emergency call Monday - Friday Telephone Support Hours: a. Monday - Friday Emergency Hours: 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Accessibility Conditions of Service Privacy Sitemap. You can lower your electricity bill by being energy conscious and following some easy energy-saving practices. Replace incandescent lightbulbs with energy-saving LEDs and get in the habit of turning off the lights whenever you leave a room.
Look into buying smart power bars for parts of your home with several electronic devices e. You can set a timer on a smart power bar so that it automatically turns off power to the devices overnight. Some smart power bars also cut power to all devices once you turn a specific device off.
For example, you could program a smart power bar to cut power to your sound system and television as soon as you turn your gaming console off. Once you know your usage per appliance, you can use this newfound knowledge to invest in energy-efficient home products.
And it's difficult to make fair comparisons between kWh figures unless they are all from periods of exactly the same length. Figures expressed in terms of power e.
Strictly speaking energy isn't actually generated or used, it's converted from one form into another. Like how the energy stored in oil is converted into heat when you burn it. And like how the electricity that runs a fan is converted into the motion of the fan blade kinetic energy. But this is a distinction that people generally don't worry about when they're staring at an excessive energy bill and wondering how they can "use" less energy.
So power is a measure of how fast something is generating or using energy. The higher a building's kW, the faster that building is using energy. Joules per second makes it obvious that power is the rate at which energy is being generated or used. It's like how miles per hour makes it obvious that speed is the rate at which distance is being travelled. The watt W is another unit of power. It doesn't make it quite so obvious what power means.
But the watt is actually just another name for Joules per second. Just some bright spark decided that equations and whatnot would be simpler if power had its own unit instead of being expressed using units of energy and time together. And they named this unit after James Watt, the Scottish inventor who had an important hand in the development of the steam engine.
The watt W is a measure of power And the kilowatt kW is a measure of power too one kW being watts. Items of equipment like boilers, electricity generators, and wind turbines, take energy in one form e. There's a limit to how much useful stuff these things can generate, and that is expressed as the rate at which they can generate energy. Which is, by definition, their power.
Consider a 10 kW wind turbine Provided it has the optimum level of wind which probably doesn't happen nearly as often as its owner would like , it can generate 10 kW of power. How long does it take to generate 10 kW?
Wrong question! That's a question that would only be asked by somebody that didn't understand what power was.
It's a bit like asking "how long does it take to travel 10 miles per hour? The two are closely connected, but we'll get to that shortly. Items of electrical equipment like light bulbs, computers, and fans, take energy in the form of electricity, and use it to do useful things for us.
Really they're converting the energy into other forms heat, motion etc. The rate at which these things use energy is their power. Or, depending on the thing, and the person you're talking to, you might hear it called their "load" or their "demand", or you might just hear it referred to in terms of a W or kW value.
Light bulbs are a simple example: if you have a W light bulb you know that it will use W of power when it's running W of power being the same as 0. The watts aren't affected by how long the W light bulb is running for A second, an hour, a day — no difference — so long as it's switched on it will be using W of power.
If it's not switched on it won't be using any power i. Some equipment is more complicated. Consider a laptop: at any one instant it might be using 50 W of power, or 30 W of power, or 43 W of power, or any similar such value.
It depends on what it's doing — if it's sitting there doing nothing it'll probably use less power than if you're hammering away on an Excel spreadsheet, listening to some music, and burning a DVD, all at the same time. The instantaneous power or instantaneous demand, or instantaneous load is the power that something is using or generating at any one moment in time. Put your laptop on standby and its instantaneous power will drop immediately.
More importantly, a kWh is the unit that electricity suppliers use to bill you for the electricity you use. They do this by either reading your usage for you, or by having you send them the reading from your meter. Usually, you are given a unit charge for your electricity; this multiplied by the number of kWh you use gives you the cost of the power on your bill. If you want to know how many kWh you use daily, simply divide your total kWh number by the number of days covered by the bill.
In reality, you are not going to use exactly the same amount of electricity every day. This changes depending upon how long you spend at home, what you do while you are there, the time of year, and the temperature.
You can even work out the number of kWh used by each appliance per day based on how long each is on for. If you use a 3 kWh heater example, it will use 15 kWh of electricity if you have it on for 5 hours.
If you want to know how many kWh an appliance uses, and already know how many watts it uses, the calculation is pretty straightforward. First, you need to convert the number of watts into kW. To do that, you divide the number of watts by 1, To get the number of kWh, you just multiply the number of kW by the number of hours the appliance is used for. Calculating kWh from kW is even easier, as you already know the number of kW for the appliance. All you need to do is multiply the kW number by the time in hours.
The 3 kW heater, if used for 3. In , according to the U. Energy Information Administration , the average American home used kWh of electricity every month, or 10, kWh each year.
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