How much Electricity does an Extractor Fan use?

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Do you know how much electricity an extractor fan uses? Well, let’s find out! Ideally, you should aim to use the most energy-efficient appliances at home. This blog post will help you calculate how much electricity your extractor fan uses so that you can get a general idea of what it is.

The power consumption of a standard bathroom extractor fan can start from around 4 watts up to 38 watts or so. Typically, the more powerful the extractor fan (higher extraction rate e.g.), the higher the power consumption.

What is the average cost of an hour of electricity?

The average price of an hour of power for a family in the UK is around £0.20p per kilowatt-hour (kWh), though this will depend on your electricity provider and the type of applications you use.

What is a kilowatt-hour (kWh)?

You may have heard of watts, as well as kilowatt, which is simply 1000 watts.

A kWh is a measure of how much electricity you’d use if you used one kilowatt for an hour, similarly, a Wh is a watt-hour – but most electricity providers charge based on kWh. You can think of it as being the same as if you’d have one 1000 Watt extractor fan (that’s an insanely high-powered extractor fan!) switched on for an hour.

How much electricity does an extractor fan use in an hour?

In order to work out how much electricity an extractor fan uses in an hour, we simply need to divide the wattage of an extractor fan by one thousand. For example, if we take the Envirovent SIL100T, it has a wattage of 8 – which is fairly low for an extractor fan.

In order to calculate how much electricity this extractor fan uses we need to do the following:

8 / 1000 = 0.008 kWh

How much does it cost to use an extractor fan for an hour?

Continuing with our example, now that we have the kWh of the Envirovent SIL100T, we now need to multiply the cost of an hour of electricity – which as mentioned above, is approximately £0.20p.

0.008 kWh x £0.20p = £0.0016p

Therefore, running an extractor fan for one hour would cost approximately £0.0016p.

Are extractor fans expensive to run?

As we can see by the calculation above, it is quite inexpensive to run an extractor fan for just an hour – but this figure can add up over time. Although it is affected by many factors, this is something to consider when choosing an extractor fan for your bathroom.

Related: Solar Powered Extractor Fans

What factors affect the cost to run an extractor fan?

There are a number of factors that can make the cost to run an extractor fan fluctuate quite a bit.

The amount of electricity an extractor fan uses depends on:

The power consumed by the motor and the size of the fan
The number and type of speeds available on your extractor (it is more efficient to change speeds than to turn a big motor on/off)
The room’s volume
How long you run your extractor for
The efficiency of the extractor fan

How to keep running costs low?

As discussed earlier, while the cost to run an extractor fan is quite low, it can add up over time.

Here are some steps to keep your electricity bill costs low:

To save money on your electricity bill, you can adjust the extractor’s speed depending upon how high an extraction you need.
It is also important to ensure that the extraction rate of an extractor is not too high for a room or it may have a negative impact on temperature.
Extractor fans should not be run for more than two hours at one time, i.e. when cooking, preparing food, after your shower or bath etc.
For typical residential applications in a bathroom, for example, you shouldn’t ever need to keep it permanently running.