Brits will spend £2 million a week using desktop fans to keep cool as the first heatwave of the year arrives — but the two million households with an air conditioning unit face a £60 million weekly bill, according to Uswitch.com, the comparison and switching service.
The cost of keeping cool has risen more than 60% in the last year as energy prices have rocketed.
For the almost four million households that use desktop fans, it costs less than 2p a week to run for the two hours they are used in a typical week, and 62p for hotter weeks.
Of the two million with air con, over 840,000 households have built-in units that can consume up to 2.7kW. In a typical week, households use their units for almost three hours, but when temperatures are high, they use them for four hours 18 minutes on average during the day and four hours 48 minutes at night, sending the cost soaring from £2.05 a week to £48.15 a week.
Another one million homes have portable air condition units that use 1kW of power, using them for almost two hours a week at a cost of 50p. During hot spells, this bill rises to £2.55 a week — an increase of 400%.
These households could save significant sums by using a desktop fan which uses 35W on average, just 1% of the power used by built-in air condition units, dramatically cutting energy bills.
This means that air con users who switch to a desktop fan could reduce their energy bill by 99% — saving themselves £48.13 a week.
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