Generating Electricity at Home

You’ve decided that you are going to slash your electric utility bill by generating electricity at home. You have also decided to make your own magnetic power generator using a simple step by step guide with materials found at your local hardware store. Before you start making free electricity you need to know exactly how much electricity you will need for your home use. Here I will give useful guidelines on understanding kilowatt hours so you can start saving a ton of money by making your own electricity.

To Kill a Watt

Your energy and money savings beings by understand the kilowatt. You are charged a fee by your power utility for the number of kilowatts your home uses over a months time. This number is called a kilowatt hour. The fee or rate you are charged is based on so many cents per kilowatt hour. There I said it, the confusing term kilowatt hour, what the heck is that?

Let us try to understand what a watt is first. A watt is how much power is used by some device or appliance in your home. It is calculated by multiplying the voltage of the device by how many amps it uses. Take a hair dryer for example, this item will typically run on 10 amps. Now the household wiring in the US is based on 110 volts of AC which is run through your wall sockets. So the hair dryer runs on 110 volts and uses 10 amps, and the power it uses is 110 times 10 or 1100 watts. If I divide this number by 1000 I have a kilowatt, or in this case 1100 divided by 1000 is 1.1 kilowatts, or KW for short.

Hopefully that wasn’t too confusing, so let’s move on to kilowatt hours. A kilowatt hour measures how much power is consumed over a period of time. For our hair dryer, we know it uses 1.1 kilowatts, so if I run that hair dryer for 1 hour it will have used 1.1 kilowatt hours. You can look at your utility bill and see how much you are charged per kilowatt hour. My base charge where I live is $0.11531 per KW hour. If I run the hair dryer for one hour it will cost me 1.1 times 0.11531, or $0.13. This doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but if you start looking around your house at all the appliances you have, and how much they are on, then you will see that it really starts to add up. You can buy a kilowatt power strip and use it at home. This device will tell you exactly how many kilowatts any device or appliance is using. Keep reading more to learn how you can save money on your electricity bill.