WattClear

Appliance Running Cost

The usual advice is to multiply watts by hours by your rate. That is wrong on most US tariffs, because an appliance is billed at whatever tier the rest of your household has already pushed you into. This prices your bill with and without the appliance and takes the difference.

From the label on the appliance or its manual. A window air conditioner is roughly 900–1,400 W; a space heater is usually 1,500 W.

Only the utilities indexed so far appear here.

Plans that cannot be priced stay listed, disabled, rather than disappearing.

Everything except this appliance. It matters: on a tiered tariff the same appliance costs more in a household that already uses a lot.

This appliance adds $594.26 a year on E-1 -Residential Service Baseline Region P, using 1,460 kWh.

Added to your annual bill

$594.26

1,460 kWh a year, about $49.52 a month

Low confidence
Bill without it
$4,333.76
Bill with it
$4,928.02

Why this differs from watts × rate

Multiplying this appliance’s 1,460 kWh by your household average rate of 40.1¢/kWh gives $585.86.

The real figure is $8.40 higher, because this appliance is billed at the margin — 40.7¢/kWh — not at your household average.

How this was worked out5 assumptions, 3 that could move the total
  • Priced against the 2026 calendar. Weekday and weekend day counts differ between years, which moves the total on a time-of-use tariff.No effect on the total
  • Weekend rates are applied on Saturday and Sunday. URDB publishes no holiday calendar, so utilities that bill public holidays at weekend rates are not reflected.Effect unknown
  • Hours are local clock hours with no daylight-saving shift, matching how time-of-use periods are written in the tariff.No effect on the total
  • Monthly totals were spread evenly across every hour because no hourly readings were supplied. A typical household uses more during afternoon peak hours, so a time-of-use bill is likely higher than this estimate.Real bill likely higher
  • No sales or utility tax was applied. Most US jurisdictions add one, so a real bill will be higher.Real bill likely higher
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Estimate — your actual bill may differ.

Tariff data: NREL/OpenEI Utility Rate Database (CC0 1.0), retrieved September 2, 2026.

Indexed so far: 450 tariffs from 45 utilities. A pilot snapshot, not national coverage. Utilities are discovered by probing population-centre coordinates in 18 states, because URDB cannot be queried by utility or by address. A provider outside every probed territory — most rural cooperatives — will not appear here yet.