generally, how much electricity is consumed by air-conditioners?

Answer 1

depends if your refering to window units or package units(outside) My shops window unit pulls about 13 amps. My house package unit pulls about 19 amps. window unit uses 1560 watts or 1.5 kwh (kilo-watt-hours) my home package unit uses 4560 watts or 4.5 kwh. kwh is the measurement of power usage for 1 hour. if my window usit were to run for an hour it would use the same amount of power as 15 100 watt bulbs.
I believe my math is correct, its been a few years since college.

Answer 2

Just to clarify something that ACEREPAIRCEN said, a kilowatt hour assumes that you are using a combination of volts and amps, multiplied together, for one hour.

Power (measured in watts) = volts * current (measured in amps)

So something may be 1.5 kilowatts, however, that doesn't make it 1.5 kilowatt hour unless it is used for exactly one hour. There is an important difference between energy and power. You've probably heard the two terms used interchangeably, as if they had the same meaning, but they don't. Energy is power dissipated over a length of time. Power is the rate at which energy is expended.

You pay the electric company for kilowatt hours (energy). For every single kilowatt hour that the electric company generates, a specific amount of fuel has to be expended. That fuel can come in the form of nuclear fuel, coal, diesel oil, energy from water falling, etc. However, at any given time, that fuel is being expended at a certain rate, depending on the electrical demand at that instant. So with this in mind, think of the total amount of fuel that the electric company burns in one hour as the energy (chemical energy). Think of the instantaneous rate that fuel is being consumed as the power (rate at which energy is being dissipated).

In the above paragraph I have related how chemical and electrical energies and powers can be directly related (and they can be using mathematics). On top of these two relationships is a third relationship, mechanical. Electricity is frequently used to perform mechanical functions through the use of magnetic fields. The units that are used to measure electrical energy, power, work, etc. are all directly related to the mechanical units of energy, power, work, etc. that is used to perform that mechanical function. A specific amount of chemical energy is needed to make the electricity happen. All of this is easy to correlate mathematically. All of this is the reason why installing compact fluoresence lights in your house in place of incandescent bulbs results in thousands of pounds of coal from being burned. You use less electricity and the electric company therefore has to burn less coal to generate the current you are using because their generator doesn't have to work as hard. It's amazing how chemical, electrical, and mechanical units are all interchangeable.

Did you actually think you would get a simple answer?!?