Anyone who’s ever air conditioned their home for a summer knows that electricity can get pricey, but it’s hard to cut back on your energy use when there are so many cool gadgets out there. Fortunately, according to a new study, your iPhone 5 isn’t what’s breaking the bank: The device only costs 41 cents a year to charge.
According to the study from Opower, which looked at the iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy S III, smartphones have an incredibly low energy cost compared to other electronic devices. A plasma TV or an Xbox can consume around $40 of electricity per year, Opower noted, a total of around 100 times that of the iPhone. A laptop PC consumes around 20 times the electricity of an iPhone, while an iPad uses approximately triple the iPhone’s energy.
Another study from Fraunhofer found that as much as 13 percent of home electricity use now comes from consumer devices, but this figure might be possible to reduce with the efficiency offered by iPhones and iPads.
“Put simply, a day spent web-surfing and Facebooking on a smartphone or tablet is a much more energy-efficient day than doing the same on a traditional computer,” wrote Barry Fischer, an Opower researcher.
A broken device might need a battery replacement or some other fix to take advantage of this efficiency, but iPhone repair and iPad repair from iResQ make it easy to get back to saving power.