Difficult to assess – What is 1 kilowatt hour of electricity actually enough for?

Shaving 2,000 times or blow-drying for an hour: Both activities consume the same amount of electricity. Figures like this help to understand where we can save energy in our private homes.

The amount of electricity we use on a daily basis is elusive because we don’t see it dwindling like a packet of sugar or a handful of tomatoes.

You can do that with a kilowatt hour

The “HEA – Association for Efficient Energy Use” has calculated what could be done with a single kilowatt hour of electricity. Or as it is currently better known: What you could save in between.

1 kWh of electricity is enough for:

• about 70 cups of coffee
• a meal for four people from the electric stove
• vacuuming with a 600 watt vacuum cleaner for almost two hours
• wash around 200 pieces of crockery and cutlery in the dishwasher
• wash around eleven kilograms of laundry in an Eco program at 40 to 60 degrees
• bake a cake
• toast about 130 slices of bread
• shave around 2000 times
• style your hair for an hour with a 1000 watt hair dryer
• Iron for about half an hour with a steam iron
• around 111 hours of light from a nine-watt LED lamp
• around twelve hours of television on an LED television with a screen diagonal of 140 centimetres
• playing Playstation for about five hours

Own power consumption

Do you actually know how much electricity you use per year? An average of 1440 kilowatt hours of electrical energy per year.

This number decreases as the size of the household increases, as many devices such as the refrigerator are shared. Therefore, a single household consumes around 1900 kilowatt hours of electricity per year on average across Germany, a two-person household around 2890 kWh, a three-person family 3720 kWh and a four-person household 4085 kWh.