- What is a Kilowatt Hour (kWh)? -

Find out how much electricity you are using at home

A Kilowatt Hour (kWh) it is a unit of measurement used to measure electricity consumption.

Therefore, if you are really interested in knowing how much electricity you are using at home and how much the electricity cost is, you need to learn what a Kilowatt Hour is.

For example, as you can see on the picture below, this household is using an average of 2700 kWh per year and it is paying 0,2173 euro per kWh they consume.

If we multiply the 2700 kWh by 0,2173 per kWh, this gives us an electricity variable cost of approximately 600 euro per year.

One Kilowatt (kW) it is the equivalent to 1000 Watts (W) so, for example, if we have a 60 Watts bulb and we want to find the equivalent in Kilowatts we just need to divide 60 by 1000 and that gives us a power consumption of 0,06 Kilowatts.

60 W /1000 = 0,06 kW

If we want to know how many Kilowatts hour are used by that bulb over a period of 10 hours, we just need to multiply 0,06 kilowatts by the 10 hours and that gives us a total of 0,6 Kilowatt Hours (kWh).

0,06 kWh x 10 hours = 0,6 kWh

Watt (W), Kilowatt (kW), and Kilowatt Hour (kWh) relationship

For those who are interested on some additional knowledge about this topic, have a look to the video below from the Youtube Effiworkx channel.

In this video we are explaining how Watts (W), Kilowatts (kW) and Kilowatt Hours (kWh) are related and how this knowledge translates into useful applications like deciding if purchasing a more energy efficient appliance it is really cost effective.

How to save electricity at home

If you are looking for tips and advice on how to save some electricity, have a look to this video that we have prepared about this very same topic.

All our videos can be found in YouTube, in both English and Spanish languages.

Additionally, if you are looking for energy saving opportunities but you don’t know where to start, use our electricity usage calculators to become aware of your electricity consumption, the electricity costs and the potential savings.

A few ‘Electricity usage calculators‘ examples: