What Does It Cost Iowans to Flush a Toilet?

Have you ever flushed the toilet at your house and wondered...there goes 12 cents? Maybe that's just something I do. Have you ever left a kitchen light on for 30 minutes and wondered how much money that costs? Ever since my fiance and I bought our first house back in March, I've been curious about what it costs to do everyday things around the house.

Thankfully we have the internet to help us answer these questions. According to CBS News, most average houses flush their toilet 5 times a day. On average it costs around $24 dollars a year to flush your toilet. A family of 4 would spend about $95. Cost may vary depending on how old or new your toilet is.

Does your family constantly leave lights on at your house? I've always preferred it to be darker than lighter in a room, so we don't have lights on very often at our house but if you left a light on for 24 hours, what would it cost? This was a lot harder to try and figure out as there are so many different kinds of light bulbs and the wattage they use.

According to Crutchfield Dermatology, a "normal incandescent bulb costs about 0.75cents per hour, and LEDs or CFLs cost only one-sixth of that." An incandescent bulb cost roughly 6 cents per 8 hours and a modern LED light will cost a little more than a penny.

Do you have a dishwasher at your house? For the longest time, our dishwasher was known as "Gabe" but we thankfully don't have to do our dishes by hand anymore. How much does it cost to run your dishwasher? This was another task that depends on a lot of varying factors.

What kind of dishwasher do you have, the selected cycle, how often you use it, and your dishwasher's KWh rate. According to Eco Cost Savings, on average it costs $0.176 per load, or $37.77 a year. If spending under $40 per year means I no longer have to wash the dishes by hand, I'm never buying a house without a dishwasher in it.

I feel like this list could go on and on so let's do 1 more. I personally charge my phone every single night while I'm sleeping. I rarely have to charge it during the day, so most of the time my phone is being charged, it's charging for about 8 hours overnight. According to a 2018 article from ZD Net, an iPhone will consume just under 20Wh while being charged overnight.

The average cost per kWh in the United States is $0.13. If 1kWh equals 1,000Wh, and we use 19.2 Wh per night charging our phones, we use roughly 7kWh per year. This totals $0.91 to charge our phones a year. I would've bet my life it cost more than a dollar per year to charge our phones but apparently, it doesn't. Once again, there are plenty of varying factors like how often you charge your phone, what kind of phone you have, and how old your phone's battery is.

I could do this forever. It's kind of crazy to think about all of the things that go into everyday life and it's important to remember, that a lot of those things aren't free. I don't even want to know how much it costs me to play video games or for my fiance to do her hair and makeup per year.