# How to work out electric costs



## shaneo95 (Jan 5, 2008)

How can you work out how much in electric it cost to run say a heat mat?


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## fantapants (Jan 4, 2008)

if a heatmat is 50w then it uses 50w an hour. a kilowatt is 1000w. your leccy company should tell you how much you pay for 1kw of energy. its between 14 and 20p per kw depending on the plan you are with.

so 50w for 10hours is 500w = 1/2 kw 
100w for 10hours is 1kw = 1kw

so to work out your whole viv usage for say a beardy you take into account

basking lamp 100w x 12 hours a day=1.2kw
uv tube 20w x 12 hours a day= 0.240kw
ceramic (nite) 100wx 12 hours a day= 1.2kw

so in a 24 hour period its 2.6kw in a week its 18.2 kw 

so 18.2 kw times by your going rate per kw ( mine is 16p)

18.2 x 16p = £2.91 per week. 



hope this isnt too complicated. tried to make it as simple as possible!


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## HadesDragons (Jun 30, 2007)

It's slightly more complex than that once you get into stats etc - a bulb on a dimming stat that is dimmed doesn't use it's full capacity of electricity. Heat mats very rarely run at full capacity.

The best you can do without attaching meters to your setups is to work out the *maximum* that your setup will use, then work out a rough estimate, based on how dimmed etc you estimate your bulbs to be.

e.g. a 100W bulb that's dimmed to 60% only used 60W, so would only use 0.6kwh (kilo-watt hours = "units") of electricity if it was on for 10 hours, as opposed to the 1kwh that an undimmed 100W would use.

If you try to underestimate the dimmed capacity of a bulb / mat / CHE, you know that the actual useage is somewhere between the two figures you end up with...


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## htf666 (Jun 23, 2007)

Don't forget to factor in the obligatory rise in price that the robbing sods keep giving us at regular intervals. Harry


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