How to Calculate a Cooking Appliance's Load
Maybe you are curious about how much electricity your cooking appliances use, or maybe you are trying to find ways to cut corners and save money on your electricity bill. Either way, calculating your cooking appliance's load is quite easy or it just might surprise you how much electricity you use in your kitchen on a regular basis.
- Find the information labels on your stove, refrigerator, large freezer and ovens. Basically, any device that uses a three-pronged plug you should find first. Look at the label to determine how much wattage the item uses. For instance, your oven's information tells you the wattage used to bake and broil. For double ovens, there is an additional rating known as the convection wattage. Make a list of each one of your large appliances and their wattage ratings.
- Locate the wattage information for your smaller appliances, such as smaller microwave units, toasters, blenders, food processors and mixers. You should notice the maximum power used rating is significantly less with these devices. Continue finishing your chart by adding the names of your smaller appliances and their maximum amount of wattage used.
- Add another column to your list that includes how much you use the appliance per day. For instance, if you use your oven for 2 hours and 30 minutes every day, you would write down 2.5. If you use your blender for 15 minutes each day, then it would be .25 because you are calculating the percentage the minutes on a scale going up to 60 and 15/60 is 0.25.
- Figure out how much wattage you use in kilowatt-hours by using the formula wattage times hours of usage/1,000. You should plug in the decimal you figured out in step three as the hours of usage. Do this for every appliance. You may add each figure up to find the total of all appliances used.