Since laptops use a battery and charger, their power consumption is usually an inconspicuous factor, at least compared to desktop computers. However, with the rising price of the electricity bill , this is something that increasingly worries more people, so in this article we are going to tell you how much money it will cost you to charge your laptop battery in a simple way.
As much as a laptop uses a battery and you always have it connected to the power outlet, it is an electronic device that has a consumption. Despite the fact that in this article we are going to tell you how much it would cost to fully charge a laptop battery if we assume that it is totally discharged (that is, from a charge cycle), in the end the consumption will be the same even if you have the equipment always connected to the current. Keep that in mind.
How much does it cost to charge a laptop battery?
As we have said before, in this article we are going to tell you how much it would cost to charge the laptop battery if it were completely discharged, that is, how much electricity costs for a charging cycle. However, keep in mind that not all laptop batteries have the same capacity and that not all laptops discharge them at the same rate, so in short, what we are going to tell you can help you get an idea but not to know exactly what YOUR laptop consumes… to do this, you can use the same formulas but taking into account the specific battery values of your device.
To perform the calculation, the first thing you need to know is what battery capacity your laptop has, something you can find out simply by looking at its technical specifications. Normally, we are going to find the capacity of the batteries expressed in mAh (milliamps per hour) or in Wh (watts per hour); The first is usually more frequent in smartphones or tablets that have low consumption and low capacity, and the second is the most frequent in laptops, which already have a much higher consumption.
However, if the battery of your laptop is expressed in mAh, the first thing you have to do is convert it to Wh, and for this you must also know the nominal voltage at which it works; Let’s assume a smartphone that has a 3,000 mAh battery and its charger provides a nominal voltage of 3.6V. 3,000 mAh is the same as 3 amps per hour, and if we multiply it by the nominal voltage, we have a result of 10.8 Wh. The formula is as follows:
Voltage (Volts) x Capacity (Amps per hour) = Energy (Wh)
This energy in watts per hour must now be converted to kWh, which is what the electricity companies “charge” us, but first we are going to put ourselves in a situation closer to reality, which is, for example, a laptop with a battery of 80 wh. In this case, we simply divide the value by 1,000 (to go from watts to kilowatts), and we would have to charge the laptop battery from zero to 100%, it would have an energy consumption of 0.08 kWh, and we would only have to multiply this value by the price we pay per kWh to know how much it costs us.
Following the example, charging the battery from 0 to 100% in a laptop with an 80 Wh battery, with a rate of €0.18/kWh, would cost us €0.0144, that is, around one and a half cents per cycle. load. Of course, this is in ideal conditions, since then the efficiency of laptop chargers is much worse and is generally around 70%, which means that, in reality, we would be getting closer to a price of 2 Euro cents per charge cycle .
