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Summary
Smartphones are very energy efficient.
It costs less than one dollar to completely charge a smartphone battery every day for a whole year.
This is true for iPhones, Samsung Galaxy phones, and other Android phones.
But how much are we spending annually keeping them fully charged and ready for action?
You likely pay under a dollar a year to charge your phone.
Not under a dollar a week or under a dollar a month.
If it plugs into a regular outlet, you can measure it with this handy little watt meter.
Under a dollar per year.
Well, two ways.
it’s possible for you to replicate both of them yourself at home.
You’ll need to look up your phone battery’s milliamp-hour (mAh) capacity and voltage.
The iPhone 13 Pro has a 3,095 mAh battery that runs at 3.83 volts.
you might look up the battery capacity of your particular smartphone model and substitute that value in the calculations.
But let’s assume you’re doing it all from scratch.
First, we need to figure out how many watt-hours of energy your phone’s battery can store.
Based on that equation, our 3,095 mAh / 3.83v iPhone battery has an 11.85 Wh capacity.
Let’s convert the Wh to kWh, the unit used by your electric company to bill you.
So the capacity of our iPhone battery is 0.019 kWh.
We’ll use the national average, which is $0.12 per kWh.
But you’re likely not even spending that much.
So perpetually topping off half the battery every day only incurs half the charging expense.
