The figure is quite surprising...
You plug in your phone every single night – and often in the afternoon too. Come to think of it, most people have a mini-meltdown if ever their phones run out of charge, so we really do spend a lot of time powering up those little devices we rely on so much.
So how much do you reckon we spend charging our phones each year? £20? £50? £100?
In fact, it’s much less than that – it’s a measly 25 cents a year, equivalent to about 17 pence.
Forbes compiled a survey of what we typically spend on household electricity, and found that while we spend over £400 a year on heating water, and over £700 on heating our homes, the cost of charging the battery on our phone that we rely on so much pales into comparison.
‘Your iPhone battery holds a charge of 1,440 mAh, or about 5.45 watt hours,’ the article explains.
‘If you fully drain and recharge your phone every day, then over a year you would have to feed it about 2,000 watt hours, or 2 kWh.
‘At an average price of 12 cents per kWh that means that your phone uses about one quarter's worth of electricity per year.’
Source: giphy
Even your laptop doesn’t cost that much more, at just £5.50 – and your iPad? A measly £1.70.
At least that’s one way of feeling a little less guilty about always being switched onto technology – charging up our phone, laptop and tablet every day costs less than £10 a year, which sounds like a bargain to us considering how much we use them.
The article also helpfully adds: ‘now you'll never feel bad about charging your phone in random outlets again’, a statement anyone who has dashed into a restaurant or shop and begged to use a plug will identify with.