What is the average residential purchase price for one watt per hour for a whole year? Leaving out all other items on the bill.
Thinking about going from a 6 watt night light bulb with few lumens to a whopping CF 40 w/output using 7 watts power.
Thanks.
National average price of electricity is about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. Running a 1-watt device 24/7 will use 8.76 kWh of energy over the course of a year, at a cost of 87.6 cents.
Do you mean simply ‘one watt’? Power, expressed in watts, is already a rate of energy usage; one watt equals one joule (a quantity of energy) per second:
1 watt (W) = 1 joule (J) / second (s).
Using energy at a rate of one watt for a year would lead to using some large quantity of energy:
1 watt * 1 year
= 1 watt * 365.25 days/year * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute
= 1 watt * 31 557 600 seconds
= 1 joule/second * 31 557 600 seconds
= 31 557 600 joules.
On my electricity bill, they charge me 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. 1 kilowatt-hour is also a quantity of energy, equal to 3 600 000 joules. So 1 watt of electricity for a year would cost me:
5 cents / 3 600 000 joules * 31 557 600 joules = 43.8 cents. 
Of course, the raw cost of the electricity is about a third of my bill; Toronto Hydro adds delivery charges and other fees. So I might have to pay almost two dollars for that usage!
Looking around my house at night, I see plenty of LEDs… feasting on my wallet!
And that’s why I have all the electronics [sub]except the cablephone box with its backup battery[/sub] on a power bar and I shut it off when I’m not using it. I suspect that the electricity usage of the electronics is still drowned out by the usage of the fridge, though.
Does it really make any sense to exclude any kind of billing mumbo-jumbo when determining the price per kWh that your electricity provider bills you? I mean they include all of these ridiculous maintenance fees etc, which are also billed by the kWh, so you might as well add it in, since you’re going to pay it anyway. I say the real price is your bill minus taxes divided by kWh used. What the hell is a “delivery charge” anyway? It’s paying for the maintenance of the infrastructure? Why are they breaking it down like that? It seems like a useless distraction to me.
According to Toronto Hydro, the “delivery charge” is the cost of delivering the electricity from the generating station to the customer. It pays for the transmission lines, towers, poles, transformers, etc. There’s a regulatory charge for administering the whole system. And a special debt retirement charge to pay down the deby of the former Ontario Hydro.
In my last bill, 281.19 kW·h of electricity cost $14.06. The total bill before taxes was $52.09, so all the other charges added $38.03. So the total cost before taxes was 18.5c/kW·h. Taxes (GST) added another $2.60, so the total was $54.69, or 19.4c/kW·h.
The cost of the electricity was split apart from the cost of delivery, so that we could have competition among electricity providers. I’m actually thinking of switching from Toronto Hydro’s default supplier and going with Bullfrog Power, which gets all their electricity from renewable sources. Bullfrog charges 8.9c/kW·h. Presumably, I’d still be paying the same delivery charges, so that bill I mentioned would go up from $54.69 to $66.20.
Thank you all. That helps.
Bullfrog power sounds like it would just be way too noisy.