Advice: The Cost of Electricity

Attribution: The Noun Project (Public Domain)

Every GPT device that I’m aware of runs on electricity. Because the cost of electricity is relatively cheap and modern computers, phones and tablets are pretty energy efficient, it’s easy to overlook the cost of electricity when determining the profitability of our GPT activities. But how significant are these electricity costs? The short answer is “not much,” with phones, and “somewhat” for laptops. I’ll use two examples to illustrate this.

Please note that this blog post does not get into cryptocurrency mining as that is a totally different situation. And plus, you won’t be mining with an old laptop or phone anyways.

The Cost of Electricity and How It’s Priced

How much you pay for your electricity depends on where you live. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) can range anywhere from around 10 cents (Arkansas, Louisiana and Washington State) to more than 30 cents (Hawaii). The national average in May 2018 was 13.15 cents per kWh for residential customers.

In case you’re wondering, a kWh represents 1,000 watts of electricity over the course of an hour. If you have a microwave that runs off of 1,000 watts, a kWh represents the amount of electricity that microwave would use if you ran it continuously for a full hour. So if you paid 20 cents per kWh for your electricity and you ran your microwave for a solid hour, you’d pay 20 cents to your utility company.

For the sake of this blog post, I will use 15 cents per kWh for my examples. I will use this value for ease of calculations and to give a slightly more conservative number to slightly overestimate the average GPT electricity costs.

The Laptop

Most modern laptops today pull less than 75 watts of power. However, some of laptop farmers out there might be using older laptops that pull as much as 90 watts assuming they’re pushing the laptop hard and are charging a depleted battery. But once the battery is charged, the laptop won’t be pulling 90 watts of power. And for most farming applications, farmers won’t be pushing their laptops to their limits. So a “90 watt laptop” won’t be pulling 90 watts all the time. However, we will go ahead and look at the following scenario:

You have a 90 watt laptop that runs 24/7/365 which you use to run videos for passive earning. Let’s also assume that, on average, the laptop pulls 60 watts of electricity (the actual amount is probably lower, but to overestimate how much power you’re using, I’m using conservative numbers). Let’s convert this to kWh over the course of a year:

60 watts x 24 hours x 365 days = 525,600 watt-hours, which equals 525.6 kWh. If you’re paying 15 cents per kWh, that adds up to $78.84 in the annual electricity cost for that laptop.

In a worst case scenario where your laptop pulls 90 watts of electricity all the time and you live in Hawaii (30 cents per kWh), your annual electricity cost would be $236.52.

In a best case scenario where your laptop pulls an average of 30 watts of electricity (a far more realistic number, especially with a newer laptop that was designed to run Windows 8 or later) and you live in Washington State (10 cents per kWh), your annual electricity cost would be $26.28.

If your laptop earns you $1 per day, even in Hawaii, you’d still come out ahead. And if you lived in Washington State, as long as your laptop made at least 8 cents per day, you’d just barely come out ahead. It probably wouldn’t be worth your time and effort, but at least you wouldn’t lose money.

The Smart Phone

Now let’s look at a smart phone. After examining these numbers, you’ll see why I (and many others) prefer to farm with phones rather than laptops.

The typical smart phone can pull as much as 10-15 watts of electricity at any one time. It actually uses a lot less during normal operation because you’re able to charge the typical phone as you use it and most smart phone chargers will provide up to 15 watts of power.

I know there are some exceptions, such as charging a fully depleted battery as you decide to play a graphic intensive game on a Samsung S8, but this is highly unlikely for the vast majority of farming applications. Even if your farming app requires you to play complex games, you won’t be doing so while chagrining a depleted battery 24/7/365.

But again, for ease of calculations and to overestimate how much power your devices use, let’s assume your phone pulls 10 watts of power all the time and you run it 24/7/365 to run farming apps, like CashMagnet. Over the course of a year, this phone would use the following amount of electricity:

10 watts x 24 hours x 365 days = 87.6 kWh. At 15 cents per kWh, you’ll be paying $13.14 in electricity. In case you’re wondering, this amounts to less than 4 cents per day. So if your phone is making 5 cents per day, you’re in the green. Most likely, you’re making at least 20 cents per phone per day, though.

And the reality is that you’re probably not pulling 10 watts of electricity on average. You’re probably pulling less than 5 watts on average for the typical farming phone (that costs $20 or less). In that case, your phone costs less than $7 each year to run nonstop. If your phone is making $10 per month, you just paid for your annual electricity bill for that phone in less than a month.

Conclusion

It is ridiculously cheap (electricity wise) to farm with phones. The biggest cost won’t be your energy bill, but rather the phone itself. As for laptops, that’s another story and depends on where you live and how energy efficiency your laptop is.