Are you burning money by powering your aquaponics system? Figuring out how much your system costs to run is an important task. Maybe you want to find out what equipment uses the most energy. Below, I have created a calculator that does it for you. It comes pre-loaded with a water pump and an air pump, but you can freely change, add, or remove any items to fit your system. You can even use it to calculate your whole-house power usage and find what equipment is the hungry hungry hippo.
Power Usage Calculator
Results:
How it’s calculated
It all comes back to the electricity usage of each piece of equipment, the number of hours per day it’s on, and the cost of electricity in your area. You should be able to find Watt or Watt/hour(W/h) usage on each equipment you have. Enter the values into the calculator above and put in how many hours its on each day. If your equipment doesn’t say how much it uses, you can use a watt-meter to measure the wattage used.
When it comes to water heaters or other products turned on or off by some controller or sensor, the only way to measure actual usage is to use a power meter and take an average reading over time to see how much you use. The 300W (watts) heater in my aquarium inside my livingroom is not turned on 24 hours per day, I would end up with fish soup. If my tank was outdoors in the winter, it might have been mostly on. So until you measure your equipment, all I can say is set it to 12h; that would mean it’s on 50% of the time as an estimate.
For those who don’t want to use the calculator above or want to learn how it could be done, let’s create a simple scenario. We have a 100W water pump and a 40W air pump running 24/7. We also have several lights using 4kW (4000 Watts) in total, which are on for 8 hours per day. The kW price is $0.1/kW.
Lets do the calculation:
- Water pump: 100w * 24h = 2400w / 1000 = 2.4 kW * $0.1 = $0.24 pr day.
- Air pump: 40w * 24h = 960w / 1000 = 0.96 kW * $0.1 = $0.096 pr day.
- Light: 4000w * 8h = 32000w / 1000 = 32 kW * $0.1 = $3.2 pr day
- Total cost per day is: $0.24 + $0.096 + $3.2 = $3.536 per day
- Total cost per mont: $3.536 * 30.41 days pr month avg. = $107.53 per month
- Total cost per year: $3.536 * 365 days = $1290.64 per year