A recent electric bill shows a surge in energy consumption between 5-6 am on some days! I am in bed during that hour so am confused at what could be causing that surge...to over 1 kWh! On another day, when I was not at home for several hours, between 12 and 4 pm, the power consumption seems to go up and down all by itself! Therefore, I switched off the supply to the cooking range and all the room heaters from the main switch last month! That seems to have helped somewhat! I live in a simple one bedroom apartment.
Technical Stuff:
A light bulb listed as 40 W consumes 40 Watts-hour of energy in ONE hour. An appliance with a 340 W rating consumes 340 Watts-hour of energy in ONE hour. We can convert this to Kilowatts by dividing the Watts by 1000. So the light bulb consumes 0.040 Kilowatts-hour in one hour while the appliance consumes 0.340 Kilowatts-hour in an hour. That is, each of these have to be ON for entire hour to consume the listed power otherwise one would expect these to consume only a partial amount of energy depending on how long the bulb or the appliance is on. The bulb, as an example, will consume 20 Watts-hour if it is ON only for half an hour. Of course, there can be several items in a house that consume electric energy.
Electrical energy consumed by a device is a product of it's Watt rating times the hours used [W x H].
How much is 1.14 kWh (Kilowatts-hour) ?
It is 1140 Watts-hour.
If a light bulb listed at 100 watt is On continuously for 11.40 hours it will consume 1140 Watts-hour
or
if a appliance listed at 1000 watt runs continuously for 1.14 hours it will consume 1140 Watts-hours.
