Have you ever given any thought to how much it costs to charge your smartphone each year? Your bad charging habits could be ruining your phone, but could they be putting a huge dent in your wallet too?
Americans, on average, spend $19 billion a year, or around $165 a household, on wasteful, “always-on,” idle electronics that consume energy all day and all night.
There are many ways to lower your power bill including unplugging gadgets when not in use and replacing old light bulbs with LEDs. But is your phone charger among these "vampire electronics?"
One blogger needed to know, so he put his phone and charger to the test and crunched the numbers. He found:
- A phone charger, when left plugged in and not charging a device consumes about 130W of power a month, or 1.5KW per year. That translates to about $0.18 per year.
- An iPhone 6 Plus being charged from zero to 100 percent battery uses an estimated 18.2 Wh, which is then multiplied by 365 days to get 7kWH per year. This translates to $0.84 per year.
So it's not exactly going to break the bank if you leave your charger plugged in all the time, or if you need to charge your phone more than once per day.
