About CostToRunIt
A straightforward answer to a question most appliance guides get wrong.
Almost every article about appliance running costs quotes a single national figure. That figure is close to useless, because residential electricity in the United States ranges from about 12.35¢ per kilowatt-hour in Idaho to 52.00¢ in Hawaii. The same appliance, used the same way, costs nearly four times as much in one place as the other.
So this site calculates per state, using rate data published by the US Energy Information Administration, and lets you override every input — wattage, hours, duty cycle and rate — because your appliance and your bill are more accurate than any average we could offer.
How we try to be useful
We show the formula on every page rather than hiding it behind a widget. We publish the duty cycle we assume, because ignoring duty cycle is the main reason published estimates are wrong. We state what our figures exclude. And we run the arithmetic in your browser, so your inputs stay with you.
Where we are uncertain, we say so. Where a figure is an estimate rather than a measurement, we label it. That is a lower-drama approach than most of the internet takes to this topic, but it is more useful.
Contact
Corrections are genuinely welcome, particularly on wattage assumptions and duty cycles. Reach us at contact@costtorunit.com or via the contact page.