Although laptops have a battery, in the end if you use it at home you’ll probably always have it plugged into the mains (and if not, you’ll end up having to plug it into the mains to recharge the battery), so the electricity consumption will be more or less the same in sum.
This is how your laptop influences the electricity bill
Before you start clarifying and doing calculations, you should bear in mind that the power consumption of a computer (whether it’s a laptop or a desktop) depends on both of its material and its use, as well as the time during which you have turned it on, so You must be aware that what we are going to calculate is an approximation and not an exact datum. All in all, this can surely help you get an idea of what a laptop consumes and how it influences what you pay on your electricity bill.
On the other hand, using a high-performance gaming laptop to play for several hours a day is not the same as using a basic laptop for office and Internet tasks. Since we have to make assumptions for this calculation, let’s take a relatively modern laptop that is turned on 10 hours a day with an average workload, that is, we assume that it is used for working on the Internet, with spreadsheets, etc. We are also going to put ourselves in the case of a portable gamer which lights up 10 hours a day to play.
- Portable for work: 36 watts for 10 hours = 0.360 kWh.
- Gaming laptop for gaming: 140 watts for 10 hours = 1.4 kWh.
Now, to do the math, you would have to assess whether in your contract you are on the free market or on the regulated market, whether you have hourly discrimination, etc., so what we are going to do is take the average price per kWh in Europe as of today, which amounts to 0.58895 dollars/kWh.
With these calculations, you would have to spend $0.212 per day on a laptop to work, or $6.36 electricity per month. On the other hand, with the portable gamer used to play, we would be at a value of 0.824$ per day, i.e. $24.73 per monthso as you can see the difference is more than substantial.
Keep in mind, however, that in reality few people will use a gaming laptop to play 10 hours a day every day, so the consumption would be quite exaggerated (however, the assumption that the laptop works does not is not, since it is the daily life of those who telecommute). We must also take into account that the price of electricity is exaggeratedly high at the moment in Europe, and that many people have prices much better than the average that we have taken as an example.
Without going any further, with a tariff of $0.139/kWh + VAT ($0.1682/kWh) we would be in much tighter figures, at $1.81 per month for the work laptop and $7.06 per months for the gaming laptop.
