Almost all electronic devices use the consumption of power in order for them to start and run for a specific period. In our daily life, most of the things around us have been digitalized, which eventually means that they require electricity and power for them to run. From charging your phone to having cold beverages all day in refrigerators and cool and hot Inverter ACs. All of them run from a little to a huge amount of power.
There are certain powers, which we can see, in the measured form, provided by authorities, for example, our electricity bills received every month or our internet bill. The bills show how many units of power we have consumed in detail. Nevertheless, have you ever wondered how much watts does a single refrigerator, TV, Microwave Oven, and all the small little gadgets that help us daily to maintain an easy lifestyle.
After the COVID-19, our lives have been more digitalized; we rely on our laptops more than ever. There was a time when computers were a necessity of every household but laptops have replaced it no time because they are more comfortable to work on, easy to carry, take less space, and provide us with the same or even better functionality than any computer. Tiny things in households’ electricity bills are hard to notice, for example, your laptop as compared to the computer, right. Have you ever noticed that you never noticed how many watts does a laptop use?
How Many Watts Does a Laptop Use?
The answer to this question is simple and complicated at the same time. If we talk about theoretically to give you an answer in some numbers, it can be stated that when a normal size – 15 inches – laptop battery takes a 10 to 20 % increase in time to charge the laptop, it is estimated that 60 watts of power are average consumption.
However, before we further discuss how many watts your laptop uses, let us enlighten ourselves about what watt power is actually.
What is a watt?
You know that you get your electricity bills for kilowatt-hours (kWh), but many people do not understand what that means.
A watt is not powered itself instead; it is the unit of measure for electricity power. Now, power is the measure of instantaneous electricity being used when any electronic gadget or appliance is turned on. When you go to purchase any electronic gadget, you will see that all its power requirements will be written in watts.
Now, if we talk about kWh, Kilo means 1000. Therefore, kWh means 1000 watts. Both watts and kilowatts are instantaneous snapshots of electrical usage.
Then you will hear the word ‘Energy’. This matters the most in electrical bills and that is what an electric company charges you. The energy here can be defined as the amount of power used under a certain period of time cumulated together. When we measure and calculate a bill for a household the energy is multiplied by time that will result in the energy and this energy will be expressed in kilowatt-hours.
In simple words, one kWh is 1000 watts of power used over one hour period of time. if you used 10 bulbs of 100 watts for almost one hour you will eventually consume around 1000 1 kWh of energy. The same goes for a one 100-watt bulb being used for 10 hours, it will consume around the same amount of 1000 kWh of energy.
This is the simple formula to measure the energy consumption in terms of watts and kWh. No, when we talk about how much watts does a laptop consumes, we need to keep a few factors in mind before accepting a calculative answer.
Type of your device
This factor matters the most because the power consumption ultimately depends on the type of device you are using and the purpose of its usage. We will list down almost all types of devices being used today alongside their purpose.
Minicomputer
If you are using a normal minicomputer laptop for normal usage its will consume around 60 watts of power. However, if you use a more advanced laptop for technical purposes the watts will depend on the type of work. There is another factor, which you should keep in mind, the laptop gets hot very easily and it needs to be cool down. If you use it while it’s hot, it will eventually consume more and that means more electricity consumption.
Gaming Laptop
A gaming laptop is equipped with heavy and powerful processors and hardware components. A gaming laptop also means that it is used more as compared to a normal laptop. The battery is also heavy-duty compared to a normal one. When you run and play exclusive games on your laptop, they also drain your power, and eventually the watt number increases in no time.
To check the power your gaming laptop is draining in kWh, check the charger you use. A normal heavy-duty gaming laptop uses around 150 to 180 watts of power.
Mac
Apple is the apple of the eye of many people worldwide. It is a dream gadget for many and it is super famous for its features, privacy, and price factor. A Mac is smaller in size than a regular laptop. A small Mac of around 13 inches will consume around 61 watts per hour and a 15-inch mac will consume around 87 watts of power.
It also depends on the hours you use it per day and what type of work you do on it but normally it will cost you around 61 to 87 watts depending on your mac. You can do the rest of the math now!
CPU
The next factor, which we should consider after understanding the power usage of our laptop according to its type, is the CPU. The larger the CPU of your laptop is, the less power it will consume. The intel i7 or i9 are considered to be laptops with large and good CPUs that ensure a smooth loading and processing time.
If the processor of your laptop is not up to the mark, it will have to work more; it means that it will need more power to perform the tasks. More effort means more power and energy.
Graphics Card
The next one on the list – which is essential, too – is the graphics card on your laptop. It is used to run certain functions and programs on your system including high-end games. All the programs a graphics card run on your system requires more power consumption than any other part of your laptop.
Have you ever seen a game lagging on your laptop? Most of the time the graphics of the games are blurry and it forms the scenes while you are walking, it is called lagging and it happens due to a slow GPU. All gamers and programmers normally have laptops with high-end GPUs, the reason is that a competitive GPU has a competitive CPU which ensures the quality of work simultaneously.
High-end GPUs are normally used for machine learning, programming, and gaming. They also ensure high-quality screens, the capacity of your battery, and much more. All of this means that there is lots of battery consumption in the whole process.
Adapter
The last one on the list we have is the adapter of your laptop. A normal laptop comes along with an adapter of 60 watts. On the other hand, a bigger laptop – typically 17 inches – comes along with a 90 watts adapter. This means that a bigger laptop consumes more watts per hour as compared to a smaller laptop.
How to calculate the actual watts?
Many factors affect the power consumed by a laptop. You can manually calculate your environment, laptop type, work type, and other factors involved to check the actual figure consumed by your laptop on a daily as well as monthly basis.
You can also opt for multi-meters available in the market today. These multi-meters give you a tentative watt number about the consumption of power of a device. They are a good source for accurate readings if you do not want to calculate everything on your own.
Measures you should take:
There are some measures that you can take to cut down the watts being used on daily basis. Most of the time we use the power units recklessly even we are not working. Not switching off the plug once you have already charged your laptop. Over-charging your laptop when it is fully charged. Seeing the screen on 100 % brightness and not using a cooling pad. If you try to use a cool pad it will help the laptop to work smoothly while it is being charged.
There are lots of steps you can take to improvise the life of your laptop as well as it save you some buck without doing much.
Lastly:
It is a very good choice to keep the track of your laptops watts because every watt of energy matters and you can take steps to cut down on your energy bill while you are also being part of the class which helps fight global warming by cutting down on the usage of unnecessary electricity.