Which appliances use the most electricity?
The household appliances that actually drive your electricity bill, ranked by what they cost to run over a year rather than by their wattage.
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Wattage is not the answer
The instinct is to rank appliances by wattage, and it gives the wrong answer almost every time. A microwave draws around 1,200 watts and a refrigerator around 150. The refrigerator costs far more per year.
What matters is watts multiplied by the hours the appliance actually draws power. A microwave runs for a few minutes a day. A refrigerator’s compressor runs about a third of every hour of every day, forever.
This is why the ranking below is built on annual cost, not on the number printed on the label.
The duty-cycle trap
Several of the biggest appliances in a house cycle on and off against a thermostat: refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, electric water heaters and hot tubs.
Calculators that multiply wattage by 'hours switched on’ overstate every one of these, often by a factor of three. A refrigerator is plugged in 24 hours a day but draws power for roughly eight of them.
Every figure on this site applies a duty cycle to those appliances. It is the single most common error in published running-cost estimates.
What this means for your bill
In most homes the order is stable: heating and cooling first, then water heating, then the always-on compressor appliances, and only then the things people worry about like televisions and phone chargers.
The practical consequence is that attention is usually misdirected. Unplugging chargers saves pennies a year. Raising a thermostat two degrees, or fixing a hot tub cover, saves real money.