What is a kilowatt-hour?
The unit your electricity is billed in, what it physically represents, and how it differs from a kilowatt.
Reviewed
Power and energy are different things
A watt is a rate — how fast a device consumes electricity at this instant. A kilowatt-hour is a quantity — how much it consumed over time.
The relationship is simply rate multiplied by time. A 1,000-watt appliance running for one hour consumes one kilowatt-hour. The same appliance running for six minutes consumes a tenth of one.
Your utility bills you for kilowatt-hours, which is why wattage alone never tells you what something costs.
Getting a feel for the size of one
One kilowatt-hour runs a 10-watt LED bulb for 100 hours, a 100-watt television for 10 hours, or a 1,500-watt space heater for 40 minutes.
That last comparison is the useful one. Heating and cooling consume in minutes what small electronics consume in days, which is why they dominate a bill.
Turning kilowatt-hours into money
Multiply kilowatt-hours by your price per kilowatt-hour. Prices are usually quoted in cents, so divide by 100 to get dollars.
Your own bill states the price you actually pay, including delivery charges, which is the number to use. The state averages on this site are for when you do not have a bill in front of you.