Since laptops use battery and charger, normally your power consumption this is usually a factor that goes unnoticed, at least compared to desktop computers. However, with the rising price of electricity billit is something that worries more and more people, so in this article we are going to tell you how much money will it cost you to charge the battery easily from your laptop.
As much as a laptop uses a battery and you always have it connected to the power outlet, it is an electronic device that has consumption. Despite the fact that in this article we are going to tell you how much it would cost to fully charge a laptop battery if we assume that it is completely discharged (that is, from a charge cycle ), in the end the consumption will be the same if you have the equipment always connected to the current. Keep that in mind.
How much does it cost to charge a laptop battery?
As we have already said, in this article we are going to tell you how much it would cost to charge a laptop battery if it were completely discharged, that is, how much electricity costs for a cycle of charge. However, keep in mind that not all laptop batteries have the same capacity and not all laptops discharge them at the same rate, so in brief, what we are about to tell you can help you make a idea but not to know exactly what YOUR laptop consumes… to do this you can use the same formulas but taking into account the specific battery values of your device.
To perform the calculation, the first thing you need to know is the battery capacity of your laptop, which you can find out just by looking at its technical specifications. Normally, we will find the capacity of the batteries expressed in mAh
However, if your laptop battery is expressed in mAh, the first thing you need to do is convert it to Wh, and for this you also need to know the nominal voltage at which it operates; Suppose a smartphone with a 3000 mAh battery and its charger provides a nominal voltage of 3.6 V. 3000 mAh is equivalent to 3 amps per hour, and if we multiply it by the nominal voltage, we get a result of 10.8 Wh. The formula is:
Voltage (Volts) x Capacity (Amps per hour) = Energy (Wh)
This energy in watts per hour must now be converted into kWh, which the electricity companies “charge” us, but first we will put ourselves in a situation closer to reality, which is, for example, a computer portable with 80 wh battery. In this case we just divide the value by 1000 (to go from watts to kilowatts), and we would have to charge the laptop battery from zero to 100%, it would have a power consumption of 0.08 kWh, and we would only have to multiply this value by the price we pay per kWh to find out how much it costs us.
Following the example, charging the battery from 0 to 100% in a laptop with an 80 Wh battery, with a tariff of $0.18/kWh, would cost us $0.0144, or about one and a half cents per charging cycle. Of course, that’s under ideal conditions, because then the efficiency of laptop chargers is much worse and is usually around 70%, which means that in reality one would be approaching a price of 2 euro cents per charging cycle.