Do fans use a lot of electricity?
Not really. Fans are quite inexpensive to run. A standard ceiling fan will run on 50 Watts, for example. More powerful fans (with high 100W+ wattage) can cost quite a lot to run.
How much electricity does a fan use?
Most fans (10W to 100W) cost anywhere from $0.0013 per hour to $0.0132 per hour to run. Even if you run a 100W fan for a whole day (24h), you will spend about $0.32/day to run it at full speed.
First of all, we will look into how many watts does a fan use. Based on this, we can calculate how much electricity does a fan use per hour, per day, per week, or per month.
Example: How much electricity does a ceiling fan use? A standard 50W fan uses 0.05 kWh worth of electricity per hour. With an average electricity price of $0.1319/kWh, that’s less than 1 cent per hour (0.66 US cents, to be exact). If you would run it for a day (24h), the 50W fan would cost you $0.16 to run.
Further on, you will find a ‘Fan Power Consumption Calculator’. You just input how many watt fan you have, and the calculator will automatically calculate how much does it cost to run such a fan per hour.
On top of that, we have prepared a fan power consumption chart with calculated running costs (per hour, day, week, and month) for the smallest 10W to the biggest 1000W fans.
To adequately calculate the running cost of any fan, you need only two pieces of information:
- How many watts does your fan use? This is known as ‘running wattage’; you can find it on the specification sheet or the label on the fan.
- How much does electricity cost in your area? Higher electricity costs obviously result in higher fan running costs.
Before you can use the fan cost calculator, you need to figure out both the wattage of your fan and the electricity cost (cost per kWh).
Let’s first look at how much power do fans use:
How Many Watts Does A Fan Use?
Do fans use a lot of electricity or not depends on only one thing:
Wattage.
For example, if you want to know if a ceiling fan uses a lot of electricity, you have to first check how many watts does this ceiling fan use. In general, the majority of ceiling fans use a lot less than 100W.
Here are roughly speaking average wattages of different kinds of ceilings:
- Ceiling Fan: 50 Watts.
- Box Fan: 100 Watts. If you check how many watts does a box fan use (20-inch), it’s always between 70W and 130W, for example.
- Tower Fan: 60W. The average tower fan will run on anywhere from 20W to 100W.
- Desktop or Table Fan: 40W.
If you don’t know how many watts your fan run on, you can check the wattage use these 3 ways:
- Check the label on the fan. Fan label usually includes electricity details, including fan wattage, amps, and voltage. Example of a ceiling fan: Ceiling fan wattage = 50 Watts, ceiling fan amps = 4.8 amps, 110V.
- Check the manual. In the manual, you will always find fan wattage, among other specifications.
- Check the fan model. If you know which specific fan you have, you can just Google that model and you will get the wattage.
Calculating how much power does your fan use is simple when you know the wattage. You use this equation to accurately calculate how much electricity does a fan use:
Fan Electricity Use = Fan Wattage / 1,000
You get the results in kilowatt-hour per hour (kWh per hour)
Example: How many kWh does a 50W fan use?
Fan Electricity Use (50W) = 50W / 1,000 = 0.05 kWh per hour
Here is how much electricity different wattage fans use:
- 10W uses 0.01 kWh per hour.
- 20W uses 0.02 kWh per hour.
- 30W uses 0.03 kWh per hour.
- 40W uses 0.04 kWh per hour.
- 50W uses 0.05 kWh per hour.
- 60W uses 0.06 kWh per hour.
- 70W uses 0.07 kWh per hour.
- 80W uses 0.08 kWh per hour.
- 90W uses 0.09 kWh per hour.
- 100W uses 0.1 kWh per hour.
You get the point.
Once you have figured out how many watts does your fan use, you can easily calculate the electricity use per hour (as seen above). In order to calculate how much does it cost to run a fan, you need to multiply the electricity use by electricity cost:
How Much Does It Cost To Run A Fan? (Electricity Price)
A 50W ceiling fan will use 0.05 kWh of electricity per hour. How much does that cost?
To calculate the fan running cost, you will need to know how much does electricity (kWh) costs in your area.
The US national average electricity cost is $0.1319.
Example: How much does it cost to run a 50W ceiling fan? Here’s how we can calculate that by multiplying kWh with cost per kWh;
Running Cost (50W Fan) = 0.05 kWh × $0.1319/kWh = $0.0066 per hour
This is quite an easy calculation. If you know that a 50W ceiling fan costs $0.0066 per hour to run, you can also calculate how much does it cost to run a fan per day (24 hours), week (168 hours), or month (720 hours).
Here are the running costs calculations for a 50W ceiling fan with the price of electricity being $0.1319 per kWh:
- 50W ceiling fan costs $0.0066 per hour.
- 50W ceiling fan costs $0.16 per day.
- 50W ceiling fan costs $1.11 per week.
- 50W ceiling fan costs $4.75 per month.
If you are interested in fans with other wattages, you can find all these calculations summarized in the table below (for 10W to 1,000W fans).
Of course, your price of electricity can be higher or lower. If it’s higher, the running costs will be higher, and if it’s lower, your running costs will be lower.
To simplify all these calculations, we have designed a fan running cost calculator. You just input fan wattage and price of electricity and the calculator will automatically determine how much you have to pay for keeping the fan running per hour:
Fan Power Consumption Calculator
How Much Does It Cost To Run A Fan? (Calculated Table)
Here is the calculated table for fan running costs per hour, day, week, and month. We have taken the average US national electricity cost of $0.1319 into account:
| Fan Wattage: | Cost Per Hour: | Cost Per Day: | Cost Per Week: | Cost Per Month: |
| 10 Watts | $0.0013 per hour | $0.03 per day | $0.22 per week | $0.95 per month |
| 20 Watts | $0.0026 per hour | $0.06 per day | $0.44 per week | $1.90 per month |
| 30 Watts | $0.0040 per hour | $0.09 per day | $0.66 per week | $2.85 per month |
| 40 Watts | $0.0053 per hour | $0.13 per day | $0.89 per week | $3.80 per month |
| 50 Watts | $0.0066 per hour | $0.16 per day | $1.11 per week | $4.75 per month |
| 60 Watts | $0.0079 per hour | $0.19 per day | $1.33 per week | $5.70 per month |
| 70 Watts | $0.0092 per hour | $0.22 per day | $1.55 per week | $6.65 per month |
| 80 Watts | $0.0106 per hour | $0.25 per day | $1.77 per week | $7.60 per month |
| 90 Watts | $0.0119 per hour | $0.28 per day | $1.99 per week | $8.55 per month |
| 100 Watts | $0.0132 per hour | $0.32 per day | $2.22 per week | $9.50 per month |
| 150 Watts | $0.0198 per hour | $0.47 per day | $3.32 per week | $14.25 per month |
| 200 Watts | $0.0251 per hour | $0.60 per day | $4.21 per week | $18.04 per month |
| 250 Watts | $0.0330 per hour | $0.79 per day | $5.54 per week | $23.74 per month |
| 300 Watts | $0.0396 per hour | $0.95 per day | $6.65 per week | $28.49 per month |
| 350 Watts | $0.0462 per hour | $1.11 per day | $7.76 per week | $33.24 per month |
| 400 Watts | $0.0528 per hour | $1.27 per day | $8.86 per week | $37.99 per month |
| 450 Watts | $0.0594 per hour | $1.42 per day | $9.97 per week | $42.74 per month |
| 500 Watts | $0.0660 per hour | $1.58 per day | $11.08 per week | $47.48 per month |
| 600 Watts | $0.0791 per hour | $1.90 per day | $13.30 per week | $56.98 per month |
| 700 Watts | $0.0923 per hour | $2.22 per day | $15.51 per week | $66.48 per month |
| 800 Watts | $0.1055 per hour | $2.53 per day | $17.73 per week | $75.97 per month |
| 900 Watts | $0.1187 per hour | $2.85 per day | $19.94 per week | $85.47 per month |
| 1,000 Watts | $0.1319 per hour | $3.17 per day | $22.16 per week | $94.97 per month |
This is the basic principle of how to calculate the running cost of any fan. If you haven’t found your answer or would like for us to calculate the running costs of your fan, just comment below, include the wattage and price of electricity, and we will try to help you out.