BellaOnline Forums Money Frugal Living What fans have the least watts?

I have to stop picking up fans. I am all worried about the heat of this coming summer, and trying to not use the AC. So i poked around my shed for fans and then even picked up a few i saw on sale. And now, yes, i have a plethora of them.

A big goal of mine is to use as little watts as possible and get my electric bill to as minimal a fee as can be done.

I am told that if i unplug my house entirely, the bill (with the service fee and taxes) will be $10 a month. I am excited to see what my bill will be for this month, since this is the first month I am living here without Dan. I expect it to be lower than our low of 400 kWh together. Anyway, I will see soon.

So, fans I have:
large box fan - 132 w
small black turbo-type fan - 96 w
sm white window fan - 66 w
tiny black table fan - 36 w
Sm white table fan - 15 w (picked this one up from a thrift store today when I saw it was only 15 watts...yay!)
And I have a tiny green USB fan that uses only 2.5 w

Yes, 2.5. That's pretty insane. USB devices are very very efficient with wattage.

What I am thinking is to use only the smallest amount of watts i need for any one time. Right now my 2.5 watt USB fan is more than enough. If there was a lower setting i'd use that. If it was warmer, I'd aim the USB fan at my face and put the white 15 w one in the window. The total watts for BOTH fans would be 17.5 watts, which is cheaper than using the tiny black fan alone at 36w.

And so on. I could just leapfrog the fans up and down my studio. Even if i had them all running at once, for some reason, that's a total of 281.5 watts in use. From six fans!

Compare the 281.5 watts with using my AC unit at 1500 watts. The AC unit also have a starting surge of between 2000-5000 watts (I need to look at the device to see for sure).

So, even discounting the massive start surge, running six fans (two of which are quite powerful), I have a savings of 1218.5 watts!

Read that again. That's really amazing.

Am I a total geek, or is this so very cool? (har, har, no pun intended)

Do you all know how to check your fans for watts? Lift up the bottom (or sometimes the sticker is on the back). There will be some technical information on either a sticker or imprinted into the plastic. Look for something that says a number with watts, like 48w. Or it might give a number in kilowatts like 4.8kw. Sometimes it gives amps = 7a.

To convert amps to watts just multiply the number by 120. To get watts from kilowats, remember that a kw is 1000 watts.

Anyone have a fan to look at? I am curious 'watt' other people are using. (you may groan at my pun now)

Has anyone looked at the watt number printed on their fans?

I'm doing really well with my fans. It's good to have an assortment of watts to play with and fan sizes. At this time the fans are supplementing my small window AC unit, which i keep on low.

If i have a fan blowing on me, i feel plenty cool and don't need to keep turning down the AC. So the fan i use is 15 watts, plus the ac on low is 270 watts. That comes out much better than no fan and using the AC on high (which would be 500 watts).

It makes me use my brain. But then i get these awesome $5 electric bills and that's the big reward.