Appliance wattage table

It is a planning scale: typical figures that let you estimate a household's need before you look at any product. It is not a database of measurements, and no row describes a specific model you own.

That distinction matters because two values drive every sizing decision and both vary between units of the same type. A fifteen-year-old refrigerator can draw twice what a new one does. The table gives you the middle of the range so the arithmetic has somewhere to start.

Rows marked cited come from the named source. Rows marked scaled were derived from a cited category value by size or rating within the same category, and each records which entry it descended from. Both labels live in the dataset rather than in a caption.

Running watts is the draw while the appliance works. Starting watts is the spike a motor needs to begin turning; for resistive loads such as a heater the two are identical because there is no motor.

Hours a day is the hours the appliance actually draws its running watts, not the hours it is plugged in. Multiplying the first column by this one gives watt hours a day, which is the figure every storage calculation depends on.

Kitchen appliances and heating or cooling equipment.

Motors are the reason the second column exists. A compressor running on 150 W can need 600 W for a second, and a well pump running on 800 W can need 2,400 W. The ratio is roughly four to one for compressors and three to one for pumps, and it decides whether a supply can start the appliance at all.

When adding appliances, add the running figures for the continuous load, then take the largest single starting figure rather than summing all of them, because motors rarely start together. Resistive loads have no spike, which is why every resistance heater converts essentially all of its input into heat regardless of price.

A refrigerator compressor runs perhaps eight hours a day in short cycles and draws almost nothing for the rest. Using 24 hours would overstate its daily energy threefold and lead to a purchase three times larger than needed.

A router is the opposite: small draw, all day. A kettle is large draw for minutes. Those two produce very different daily energy from very different wattages, and only the hours column separates them. Where duty depends on conditions, the dataset note says so: a sump pump follows the water table, and a fridge in a hot garage runs longer than the category figure assumes.

The energy guide label on a refrigerator or freezer states annual kWh use. Divide by 365 for a daily figure, then divide by the hours column to sanity-check the running watts. If the two disagree, trust the label: it describes your unit.

For anything without a label, a plug-in power meter costs less than the mistake it prevents. Ten minutes of measurement beats any table, including this one. For electronics, the rating on the power brick is an upper bound rather than a typical draw.

It cannot tell you what your specific appliance draws, because that depends on age, condition and the voltage at the socket. It cannot tell you the duty cycle in your house, which depends on weather, insulation and habits. And it cannot tell you whether your wiring can carry the total, which is a question about circuits rather than appliances.

Where a page on this site cites a source, that source governs; where it states an assumption, the assumption is yours to check. The method page explains how each figure is produced and how corrections are published, and the changelog records when a value changed.

Screens, lamps, laundry and pumps.

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The categories that matter most for outage planning.

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The same figures in other units are handled by the unit converter.