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Smartphones are very energy efficient. It costs less than a dollar to fully charge a smartphone battery every day for an entire year. This is true for iPhones, Samsung Galaxy phones, and other Android phones.
Most of us charge our phones without a second thought because they are an indispensable part of modern life. But how much do we spend annually to keep them fully charged and ready for action?
Smartphones that use surprisingly little power
Of all the electrical things you use in the home — computers, TVs, smart speakers, even analog things like light bulbs and ceiling fans — we feel supremely confident in saying that nothing uses as little energy as your smartphone. This is true whether you’re using an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy phone, or another type of Android phone.
In fact, we will simply spoil the surprise from the beginning so as not to leave you in suspense. You probably pay less than a dollar a year to charge your phone. Not less than a dollar a week and not less than a dollar a month. under a dollar by year.
With high energy prices and a lot of energy being wasted even by idle devices, we should all be keeping an eye on things, but worrying about spending money on charging your phone shouldn’t be at the top of the list, or on the list. list at all.
Here’s how to calculate it yourself
How can we say with such confidence that charging your phone is so cheap? Well, in two ways. You can replicate both yourself at home.
One requires some basic math and the other requires you to use an actual watt meter to monitor your charger. However, you’ll probably find using a watt meter much more interesting when you’re measuring larger devices like TVs.
Calculate the Cost of Theoretical Charge
The most accurate way to measure the cost of charging your smartphone is to use a physical tool to measure actual power consumption, which takes into account the energy lost in the charging process. But in practical terms, it’s a very small amount of power, and small low-voltage chargers are usually pretty efficient, so there’s not a lot of overhead.
With that in mind, we’re pretty comfortable using battery capacity as a benchmark for calculating how much power you’re using to charge your battery. You will need to find the capacity and voltage in milliamp-hours (mAh) of your phone’s battery.
As an example, we’ll use the battery found in the iPhone 13 Pro as a benchmark. The iPhone 13 Pro has a 3,095 mAh battery that runs at 3.83 volts.
You can look up the battery capacity of your particular smartphone model and substitute that value into the calculations. Instead of wasting time digging through search engine results, we recommend visiting GSMArena.com, a huge database of phone statistics, and searching for your particular phone model to see battery capacity and more.
The GSMArena stats list not only the mAh value of the battery, but also the watt-hours (Wh), which will allow you to skip one of our calculations.
But let’s assume you’re doing it all from scratch. First, we need to find out how many watt-hours of energy your phone’s battery can store. To do this, we first need to convert the milliamp-hours to watt-hours by multiplying the battery capacity times the voltage and dividing by 1000.
(mAh * V) / 1000 = Wh
Based on that equation, our 3095mAh/3.83v iPhone battery has a capacity of 11.85Wh. It’s the same amount of energy stored no matter how we label it, we’re simply changing the units from mAh to Wh because your electricity usage is measured and billed in kilowatts.
Now let’s calculate how much it costs you to charge an 11.85 Wh battery, assuming it’s completely depleted. We are going to convert the Wh to kWh, the unit that your electric company uses to bill you.
Wh / 1000 = kWh
So the battery capacity of our iPhone is 0.019 kWh. Then, in turn, you can calculate how much that amount of electricity is costing you by looking at your electricity bill for the value of the cost per kWh. We will use the national average, which is $0.12 per kWh.
Battery Capacity in kWh * Cost-per-kWh =Â Charge Cost
Our iPhone 13 Pro, based on our perfectly efficient charging scenario here, costs $0.0023 to charge from a fully dead state to a fully charged state.
Assuming you drained the battery every day of the year and then recharged it, it would cost you $0.83, not even a dollar.
But chances are you’re not even spending that much. I don’t know about you, but with the larger batteries in modern smartphones, I rarely drain the battery completely every day and usually put it back on the charger when it’s still about 50% full.
Therefore, perpetually filling half the battery every day only generates half the charge cost. Which means, at least in my case, I’m not even spending that 83 cents a year to charge my phone, but more like 40-50 cents.
Measure the charger with a wattmeter
All calculations in the previous section are based on raw numbers and do not consider any inefficiencies in the charging process.
As we mentioned earlier, the inefficiency of small phone chargers is pretty trivial, but if you really want to know exactly at $0.001 how much it costs to charge your phone, you’ll need a watt meter.
Usually when you use a watt meter you can get a pretty accurate reading right away. If you want to see how much power your TV uses, you can simply plug it in, turn it on, and see how many watts it consumes under load.
But if you’re metering a charger, you’ll need to leave it plugged in for at least one full charge cycle. And in the case of a very small battery like one found in a phone, you’ll probably want to leave the watt meter plugged in for at least a few dozen charge cycles to get a more accurate idea of ​​how much the charger and battery are charging. . the charging process will cost you over time.
The best phone chargers of 2022 
TECKNET 65W PD 3.0 GaN USB C Charger Type C Charger 3-Port Fast Wall Charger Foldable Adapter Compatible for iPhone 14 Pro Max/14 Plus/13, MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, Switch, Galaxy S22/S21
Apple 20W USB-C Power Adapter – Fast Charge Capable iPhone Charger, Type-C Wall Charger
Amazon Basics 100W Quad-Port GaN Wall Charger with 2 USB-C Ports (65W + 18W) and 2 USB-A Ports (17W), White (Non-PPS)
Anker Wireless Charger, 313 Wireless Charger (Pad), Qi-Certified 10W Max for iPhone 12/12 Pro / 12 mini / 12 Pro Max, SE 2020, 11, AirPods (No AC Adapter, Not Compatible with MagSafe Magnetic Charging)
USB C Car Charger 48W Super Mini AINOPE All Metal Fast USB Car Charger Adapter PD&QC 3.0 Dual Port Compatible with iPhone 14 13 12 11 Pro Max X XR XS 8 Samsung Galaxy Note 20/10 S21 / 20/10 Google Pixel
Techsmarter 11-port charging station with five 100W USB-C PD ports, 25/45W PPS, five 18W USB-A ports and detachable 15W wireless charging pad. Compatible with MacBook, iPad, iPhone, Samsung, Dell, HP, Yoga…
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