Although laptops have a battery, in the end if you are using it at home you will probably always have it connected to the mains (and if not, in the end you will end up having to connect it to the mains to recharge the battery), so that the electricity consumption will be more or less the same in short.
This is how your laptop influences the electricity bill
Before starting to clarify and make calculations, you should bear in mind that the electricity consumption of a computer (whether it is a laptop or a desktop) depends on both its hardware and its use, as well as the time you have it on, so You must be aware that what we are going to calculate is an approximation and not an exact data. All in all, surely it can help you to get an idea of what a laptop consumes and how it influences what you pay on your electricity bill.
On the other hand, using a high-performance gaming laptop to play many hours a day is not the same as using a basic laptop for office and Internet tasks. Since we have to make some assumptions for this calculation, let’s take a relatively modern laptop that is turned on 10 hours a day with a medium workload, that is, we assume that it is being used to work browsing the Internet, with spreadsheets, etc. We are also going to put ourselves in the case of a gaming laptop that is turned on for 10 hours a day to play.
- Portable to work: 36 watts for 10 hours = 0.360 kWh.
- Gaming laptop for gaming: 140 watts for 10 hours = 1.4 kWh.
Now, to carry out the calculation we would have to assess whether in your contract you are in the free market or in the regulated market, if you have hourly discrimination, etc., so what we are going to do is take the average price per kWh in Spain at today’s date, which stands at 0.58895 Euros/kWh.
With these calculations, we would have to spend €0.212 a day with a laptop to work, or €6.36 electricity per month. On the other hand, with the gaming laptop used to play, we would be at a value of €0.824 per day or €24.73 per monthso as you can see, the difference is more than substantial.
Keep in mind, however, that in reality not many people will use a gaming laptop to play 10 hours a day every day, so that consumption would be quite exaggerated (however, the assumption of the laptop to work is not, since it is the day to day of those who telework). We must also take into account that the price of electricity is exaggeratedly high right now in Spain, and that many people have much better rates than the average that we have taken for the example.
Without going any further, with a rate of €0.139/kWh + VAT (€0.1682/kWh) we would be in much tighter figures, standing at €1.81 per month for the work laptop and €7.06 per month for the gaming laptop.
