My electric bill makes me feel like I need a background in electrical engineering to decipher it. It’s full of terms like distribution, generation and transmission, and they’re just thrown out there like, of course, I know what they’re talking about. Don’t you?
I suspect the electric bill is probably the most mysterious bill most of us get. Many the terms on the electric bill don’t mean a whole lot to the average Joe or Jane.
In the next few posts, I’ll define a few of those terms and try take some of the mystery out of electric bill.
First, what’s a kWh??
On my electric bill, I’m billed according to my usage of kWh. kWh appears repeatedly on my electric bill with no explanation. Flipping over my bill reveals a less-than-helpful guide to a variety of terms used on my bill. The less-than-helpful guide says kWh is “(kilowatt hours) is a measurement of electrical energy.”
Well. There you go. Mystery solved.
Ahem. Um. What’s a kilowatt hour?
A watt is a unit of power. It takes a 100 watts to power a 100 watt light bulb. If you leave that light bulb on for 1 hour, you’ve used 100 watts of electricity for one hour or .1 kilowatt hours of electricity. If you leave a 60 watt bulb on for an hour, you use .06 kilowatt hours.
A kilowatt hour is a measure of the electricity used over one hour of time.
[...] on at least 4 hours a day. 4 hours per day is 240 watt hours or .24 kilowatt hours a day.(What’s a kilowatt hour?) My cost per kilowatt hour is about 8 cents. So leaving that light on for one day costs a whopping [...]