What Types of Fans are there?
Fans don't use too much electricity and aren't crazy expensive to run; the standard ceiling fans only use about 50 watts, quite a small amount. However, when we start getting towards the bigger and more expensive fans that take a lot more power, you're looking at over 100 watts, and it begins to get a lot more expensive, so how much electricity does a fan use?
The number of watts that you use will also depend on the type of fan that you are using, so using this information, you can get a rough idea of the ballpark that you're talking about numbers-wise.
Ceiling Fan
These are the most common types of fans that you'll typically be dealing with and are found in various environments, homes, workplaces, schools, and effectively anywhere without air conditioning installed, as it is a much cheaper substitute. The majority of ceiling fans are around fifty watts, but the more powerful ones can get as high as a hundred.
Tower Fans
The most common new fan that you'll see around in offices these days as they're so much more compact and also don't have any blades, so they're safer too. They are also more energy efficient than other fans and make better use of those watts. Because of this, they can range anywhere between 20 and 100 watts.
Desktop/Table Fan
Another really common fan that is all over households worldwide; they're great to keep one person very cool when the temperature gets high. This kind of fan doesn't get too high. They just stay at around 40-odd watts.
How Many Watts does a Fan use?
The majority of fans use around ten to a hundred watts of power, which is around $0.013 per hour on average. To put that into scale a little better, you could use a powerful 100W fan for an entire day, twenty-four hours, and it would only cost around thirty-two cents, even when running at full speed!
Further down this article, we'll go into a 'Fan Power Consumption Calculator' where you can automatically figure out the cost of the fan to run just by inputting the number of watts that your fan is, so you can figure out the hourly cost of the fan that you're using.
There is also a chart so that you can calculate the running costs of a whole range of fans from just 10 watts to 1000 watts, and over periods of hours, days, weeks, or even months.
The two main pieces of information you need to figure out how much you'll be spending, and the general running costs are the number of watts your fan is using, known as the 'running wattage' and the electricity costs of the area that you're living in.
You can find out the wattage of your fan by checking the label on the fan or the specification sheet that should have come with the fan. Your area's electricity costs will also affect the price because higher electricity will obviously cost more, but this is information you should generally know any way for all your other electrical devices in your home.
Once we've figured out those two figures, we can look at the fan cost calculator, but first, let's look into how much power fans use.
Calculating the Wattage
For example, we'll have a look into ceiling fans. Generally, most ceiling fans will use under a hundred Watts, so it shouldn't be a crazy high figure. For ceiling fans, it sits around fifty watts on average, whilst box fans use anywhere between seventy and a hundred and thirty watts, so a slightly higher amount of electricity is used there. Tower fans have a massive range of twenty to a hundred watts, and a desktop or table fan will sit around forty watts.
As you can see, there is such a wide scale of wattage being used, so make sure to check and find out the specific number; these are just general averages.
The best way to check out the wattage of what you are using will be to check the label, as it can also have lots of other important details like the fans amps and voltage, as well as the wattage, but if you can't see it there for whatever reason then check the manual for a ton of other specifications too, and as a last resort check the fan model online with a quick google search.
Once you have the wattage, then it's easy to find out the amount of electricity it's using with a quick calculation.
Fan Electricity Use = Fan Wattage / 1000
The results will be measured in kWh per hour, which is kilowatts per hour used.
A quick example of this is a 70-watt fan will use 0.07 kilowatts per hour, we do the calculation 70 / 1000 = 0.07
Using this, you can just convert any wattage that is a multiple of ten just down three decimals.
So now that you've used the Wattage of your fan to figure out the amount of electricity that you use, we can now move on to calculating the running costs.
How Much Does it Cost to Run a Fan?
If we use that same calculation as before with the 70W ceiling fan that uses 0.07 kiloWatts of electricity per hour, how do we figure out how much that costs?
You'll need to know that important figure that we previously mentioned of the cost of electricity in your area, but for our calculations now, we will just use the US national average cost, which is $0.1319.
So to figure out the running cost of a 70-Watt fan, we multiply the running cost of the fan by the electricity cost.
Running cost for a 70 Watt fan = 0.07 x $0.1319/kWh = $0.009233 per hour.
It isn't a particularly difficult calculation to do, and using that; we can then multiply it by other numbers to figure out the running costs for another period of time.
We can multiply it by 24 for the cost of a day, 168 for the cost of a week, and 720 for the cost of a month!
So that 70-Watt fan would cost:
-$0.221592 for a day
-$1.551144 for a week
-$6.204576 for a month
Knowing the price of electricity is important for these figures to be correct; however, because whilst this is the average for American homes, some areas are much more expensive than others and vice versa, so make sure to check that all your calculations are going to be correct.
We've also made a little table to help you figure out what your costs are if you are finding all the numbers overwhelming.
| 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 table is just the basic calculations of how much you'll be spending on running your fan over various time periods, and if any of the wattage numbers are different from the ones that we have in the calculator, then take the aforementioned calculations step by step and figure out your exact figures!
Last Thoughts
Whilst we appreciate that a lot of the numbers can be overwhelming at first, use the calculator to figure out how much you're spending from whatever wattage your fan is, and if your particular model doesn't fall into one of the categories in our calculator, go through the maths bit by bit, and you'll be able to get those costs absolutely perfect.
How much does a good fan cost?
There is a wide range of fans, so it depends on what you're looking for; the main categories are ceiling fans, tower fans, box fans and desktop fans. You'll need to evaluate your needs and how many people you are trying to keep cool and make a calculated decision.
How much does leaving a fan on cost?
To figure out this number, you would have to multiply the electrical output of your fan by the cost of electricity in your area per hour to figure out how much your fan in particular costs. Some fans cost more to run than others, and others less.
How much does it cost to run a fan 24 7?
It will depend on the fan you own and its model and wattage of it; some fans cost a lot more than others. To figure it out, you'll have to know the number of kilowatts an hour that your fan uses, as well as the cost of electricity.
