Does opening/closing the garge use up alot of electricity?

Question

at my house, my garage door is opened and closed by electricity. and im assuming that since the garage door is pretty heavy it must take some power to get it opened and or closed.

so does it use a lot of electricity? im not trying to waste money

Answer 1

Let's make some assumptions from which to guess how much electricity your garage door opener uses. We'll make some rather extravagant assumptions to determine a worst case scenario (think most costly possibility).

First figure out how many times you open and close the garage door in a week. Then we'll multiply that by 4.3 (the average no. of wks in a month). Then fudge the horsepower output wattage, since motors generally use more juice when starting up than when they're regularly running; and we'll also assume a really heavy duty door raising motor, and that it takes 5 minutes to totally raise the door. (Now that is allowing for the worst case!)

So here's what we've assumed

10 door raisings a day every day of the week: 7 days/week
4.34 weeks per month

1/2 horsepower motor using more than it's horsepower rating in electricity because of start-up and inefficiencies (3/4 x 750watts
electricity draw per 1 horsepower) = 570 watts)

[10x7x4.34] x [570 x 5/60] x [$0.12 cost per kilowatt hour] / 1000

I come up with $1.74 for a month. The 1000 division on the end is something that could be done to the product of the first 2 brackets to get estimated kilowatt-hours your usage effects, before the 3rd bracket, but it doesn't really matter when, since division and multiplication operations (as long as you're not doing any addition/subtraction) can be done in virtually any order.

Hope this helps and makes you a wiser consumer. 12 cents per kilowatt hour is somewhat on the high side I think, but I haven't looked into the annual reports of utilities to ck more closely what might be a better figure. I doubt that 20 cents per kilowatt-hour would be applicable -- except maybe in CA.

If you want to cut electricity usage, look to the high wattage appliances that are used regularly. For light fixtures that tend to be on for long periods (esp lighted with incandescent or halogen bulbs) see if compact fluorescents can work there. My own usage was 6080 kwh for year 2006, or an average of 507 kwh per month. (There are only 2 of us, but we do keep bad hours and I have my computer on almost every day for 12-16 hours -- which according to its info plate is abt 600 watts.)

About average electricity usage... The Southern Company annual report (p83) for fiscal 2005 lists AVERAGE RESIDENTIAL

revenue per kilowatt hour as 8.57 cents
annual kwh use as 14,084
yearly revenue $1,207

[ I enjoy seeing aggregate data to see where I fit. Maybe you do too.]

Answer 2

The amount of energy that a garage door opener uses is very small. Most door openers have cycle of only a few seconds. Running the opener for twenty seconds or so ten times a day won't use as much energy as leaving a 100-watt light bulb on all day.

Don't lose any sleep over it. You'll save more energy by keeping unnecessary lights off, the house nice and air tight, and the thermostat set to 68°!

Answer 3

I don't think that it uses much electricity. I do know that in the winter keeping the door closed as much as possible helps keep cold out of my house, and in the summer I keep it open for better ventilation. My garage is attached to my house.

Answer 4

it depends on the motor you have on your garage door opener.