Electric Blanket Running Cost: Per Night and Per Winter

A 100 W electric blanket uses 0.2 kWh a night and 24 kWh a winter — about $4.32 in the United States. What it costs in 23 countries, and what it really replaces.

An electric blanket is the rare heating appliance whose running cost is genuinely too small to worry about. A typical one draws 100 W, so two hours before bed is 0.2 kWh — about $0.04 at the United States average of $0.18/kWh. Used that way through a 120-day cold season it comes to 24 kWh, or roughly $4.32 for the whole winter. That is the answer, and it is the same order of magnitude everywhere on earth. The interesting question is not what it costs but what it is a substitute for, because that is where the comparison usually goes wrong.

What an electric blanket actually draws

The electric blanket appliance page on this site uses 60 W as the low end, 100 W as typical and 200 W as the top of the range. A king-size dual-control blanket with both sides on is at the upper end; a single underblanket is at the lower. Those three numbers cover essentially everything sold.

Two features of the appliance make the honest figure lower than the arithmetic suggests. First, most blankets are thermostatic: they pull full power while heating up and then cycle down to a maintenance level to hold the temperature. The label wattage is the peak, not the average, so 100 W × 2 hours is an upper bound on a two-hour session rather than a typical one. Second, the common pattern of use is a preheat — twenty or thirty minutes at a high setting, then off — which is a third of the two hours this page assumes.

Everything below therefore uses the deliberately generous version: 100 W held for two full hours, every night, for 120 nights. If your figure comes out lower than this page's, that is expected.

Per night, per week, per winter

The whole calculation is the one this site uses everywhere: kilowatts × hours × price per kWh. A 100 W blanket is 0.1 kW, so two hours is 0.2 kWh, and the season is 0.2 × 120 = 24 kWh.

To put 24 kWh in proportion: it is roughly what a fridge uses in a fortnight, and less than a single tumble-dryer load per week over the same period. An electric blanket does not register on an annual bill. It is one of the very few appliances on this site where the correct advice is to stop optimising and use it.

The same blanket in 23 countries

Where the number does move is across borders, and by more than any feature of the blanket itself. These are the same 24 kWh, priced at each country's residential average — the figures behind electricity prices by country. The dollar column exists so the rows can be compared with each other.

The spread from India to Ireland is 5.7× — the widest ratio of anything on this page, and none of it has anything to do with the blanket. Even so, look at the size of the numbers: the most expensive winter of electric blanket in the world is $11.04. There is no country in this table where the answer to "can I afford to use it?" is no.

A whole winter of blanket, priced in gas

Cost in currency is easy to shrug at, so here is the same 24 kWh converted into something physical: how much gas heat you could have bought with the same money, in the eleven countries where this site holds a gas price. A condensing boiler is taken at 92% efficiency, the same figure used by the heat pump comparison calculator and the country pages, so the three cannot disagree.

That is the sentence worth taking away. In every one of these countries, an entire winter of electric blanket costs less than four hours of gas boiler at full output. If using it lets you delay the heating by half an hour on more than a handful of evenings, it has already paid for its whole season.

The right-hand column assumes a 24 kW boiler running flat out, which is a deliberate simplification — a real boiler modulates down and rarely holds full output for long. Read it as an order of magnitude, not a stopwatch.

The comparison with a space heater is not the one most pages make

Almost every page on this subject reaches for the same line: a blanket uses 100 W and a heater uses 1,500 W, so the blanket is fifteen times cheaper. The arithmetic is right and the comparison is not, because the two appliances do different jobs. A space heater raises the air temperature of a room, which is what you need to sit and read, work at a desk, or have other people in the room with you. A blanket raises the temperature of the surface touching your skin, and does nothing whatsoever for the room.

So the honest framing is a narrow one. An electric blanket replaces heating you would have run only for yourself, while sitting still or asleep. Within that narrow case it is overwhelmingly the cheaper option: at United States prices, a 1,500 W heater run for four hours costs about $1.08, which is 30 nights of blanket. Outside that case it substitutes for nothing, and a household that swaps its heating for blankets and then sits in a 12 °C living room has not saved money so much as stopped buying warmth.

The other thing this framing rules out is the "97% saving" style of claim. You cannot express a blanket as a percentage saving against a heater, because the denominator is not the same product. What you can say is the version above: for one seated or sleeping person, a night of blanket costs a small fraction of an evening of heater, and for anything else it is not an alternative at all.

Two people, one bed, two settings

For a shared bed, the single largest lever on the yearly cost is not a usage habit but a purchase decision: dual control. A dual-control blanket runs each side of the bed on its own thermostat, so one person can have their half on a high setting while the other has theirs off entirely. A single-control blanket forces both halves to the same setting, which in practice means heating a side nobody has asked to be heated — and, more often, means the person who runs cold turns the whole thing up.

On this page's assumptions that is the difference between running 200 W and running 100 W, which is the difference between the top and middle rows of the first table: 48 kWh a season against 24. In absolute terms it is still small money, but it is a larger effect than every switching-off tip combined, and unlike those it requires no discipline at all.

What actually changes the number

• Preheat and switch off. Twenty minutes at a high setting warms a bed as effectively as two hours at a low one, and the bedding holds it. This is the single change that turns the figures on this page into a third of themselves.
• Use it to justify a lower thermostat, not alongside the same one. The blanket's own 24 kWh is trivial; the saving is entirely in the heating hours it lets you avoid. If the heating schedule does not change, nothing has been saved.
• Buy dual control if the bed is shared. See above — it halves the load and settles the argument.
• Do not leave the controller plugged in all summer. The draw is tiny, but it is months of it for zero benefit, and it is the same habit that the standby power guide is about.
• Ignore anything sold as a "low-energy" blanket. Like every resistive heater, it turns electricity into heat at exactly one to one. Wattage and hours are the only two variables, and both are printed on the label.

Age matters far more than hours

This is the one place where the interesting question about an electric blanket is not financial. The running cost is a few units of currency a winter; a failure is a fire in a bed. UK fire and rescue services and electrical safety bodies converge on the same guidance: replace an electric blanket after about ten years, have it checked every two to three years, and stop using it immediately if there are scorch marks, exposed wiring, damp damage or a frayed flex. Storing it rolled rather than folded avoids the creases that break the internal wiring in the first place.

None of that changes a figure on this page. It is simply the part worth acting on, whereas the electricity is not.

Work out your own figure

Take the wattage from the blanket's label or its controller, decide honestly how many hours it holds power rather than how many hours it is switched on, and multiply by your own price per kWh — the one on your bill, not a national average. The electric blanket page does it for you at any wattage and price, and the electricity cost calculator does the same for anything else in the house.

If you are trying to decide how to heat rooms rather than people, the two pages that matter are what a space heater costs per hour, per day and per winter and, for a whole house every day of the season, heat pump against gas boiler — where the sums are three orders of magnitude larger than anything here.

Frequently asked questions