This week I was supposed to research how much it would cost to “live”. Therefore, I spent time looking at things like electricity, water, clothing, food, and some other things. I will be basing the costs of all this for one weekend day.
I first calculated the cost for my most used electronics, for example, my PC and my phone. To calculate the cost of electricity I had to divide the wattage used by 1000 to get the kilowatts and then multiply the kilowatts by the number of hours a certain item was used for which gives us the kWh (kilowatts hour). After that, I multiplied the kWh by 6.5¢ because that’s how much it cost’s per kWh during off-peak periods in Ontario. In Ontario, during the weekends and on statutory holidays it is off-peak hours for the whole day. So using my PC as an example, it uses 500W of power and let’s say I use it for 10 hours. I would divide 500 by 1000 to get 0.5 and then multiply 0.5 by ten giving us 5 kWh’s. If we take the off-peak rate which is 6.5¢ per kWh then we get a total of 32.5¢ to power the PC for ten hours.
In my calculations, I didn’t include property tax, recycling/garbage, or sewage since those were difficult to calculate. The electricity was the only thing I could “accurately” calculate, with the water and gas prices being rough averages. I also, however, include food and clothing to the price in addition to the other factors. The price of the home also wasn’t included nor was a car or gas since these are just the items that I use during the weekends including the realistic amount hours spent using them.
Adding up the cost of everything is difficult because I couldn’t find the exact models of certain appliances so the price may range from hundreds to maybe even thousands of dollars. For one day (theoretically) it would cost $1,008,612 and that’s not even including things like utensils, furniture, decorations, and things like that. I priced questionable appliances such as fridges and washing machines at $1000 and stoves and dishwashers at around $500. Things included were 12W wall outlet charger, an iPhone 7, a gaming PC, lights around the house, heating, a fridge, a dishwasher, a stove, a washing machine, a dryer, a water heater, hydro bills, gas bills, food, clothing, a home, and all the appropriate things needed to run certain appliances.
Technically after the first day, you’d only have to pay $19.14 since you have already bought certain items and most of them can be used more than once saving quite a lot of money. Therefore if you already have all of the appliances and a home then $19.14 would be more accurate for how much it would cost to live for one day give or take a ten or few dollars. This all isn’t including different taxes and there are probably other things I’ve forgotten. This isn’t reliable information and is just a fun thing to do some research on as a little project.
Overall it was interesting finding out how much electricity, water, and other things cost and I got to realize how much money was spent for me to be able to live a day the way I do.