How many pieces of toast can you get for one kilowatt-hour of electricity? A new on-line tool/toy from GE will tell you. The answer is 36. Let's see what else we can learn!
How far could you drive emitting the same amount of CO2 your appliances cause in a year? Probably tens of thousands of miles. My own appliance mix (no air conditioning or heater--in temperate San Francisco) adds up to about 700 gallons of gas worth of CO2. Like driving 20,000 miles a year even though I have no car!
For the same kilowatt-hour that made 36 pieces of toast you could run your central air conditioning for 12 minutes, or brew 3 pots of coffee in your coffee maker. Or you could get one-third of the way through washing a load of dishes in your dishwasher.
One kW h will run your refrigerator for five hours. To run it for a year will cost about $114 in West Virginia, or $264 in Alaska. In Alaska you would probably also have a chest freezer, for the moose, at $383 per year.
Enjoy this toy, using the electricity costs for your state. Set it for your own appliance mix. Americans have some of the most energy-intensive homes on the planet, because they are large, often air conditioned, and we have lots of gadgets. And the calculations in this tool don't account for the emissions from manufacturing and distributing all those gadgets.
[crossposted from the HaraBara blog]
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