What’s up, I believe most people have thought about electric energy consumption and electrical safety when using a hair dryer.
But do you know how many watts a hair dryer use? And what will happen if our hair dryer uses more watts than the outlet’s wattage limit?
And We also have heard saying like: The higher the wattage does the hair dryer use, the faster you can dry your hair. Is that true?
Today I will give you the most detailed explanation in this article, and help you to know how this wattage thing affects a hair dryer.
If you are not familiar with electricity and power, that is okay because we are going to talk about it in a simple, straightforward way.
Let’s find out the answers to these questions today!
1. What is Watt?
Before we get into the topic, let’s go through what watt is real quick.
Watt (you can also write this way: W) is a unit of measurement of power.
Therefore, when we are saying how many watts a hair dryer use, we are actually asking how much power it consumes.
If you take a look at an electronic product’s specs chart, there is always a row called ‘rated power’. But what does it mean to us after all?
Knowing how many watts our hair dryers use is equal to knowing how much money we are going to pay for using it.
For example, if your hair hair dryer’s rated power is 1,600 watts. Which means the hair dry’s average power consumption per hour is 1,600 watts, which can be written as 1.6kWh.
According to the electricity price in my place, if I have a hair dryer uses 1600 watts per hour, then I need to pay nearly $0.25 for using the dryer for an hour since the price is 16.7 cents per kWh. (This will vary in countries and regions)
2. How Many Watts is a Hair Dryer?
Do hair dryers use a lot of electricity?
It mainly depends on what kind of hair dryers you have. Different hair dryer models can vary a lot.
For home use, the range of watts used by average hair dryers is between 750 – 2,500.
For professional salons, the hair dryers they use can reach 3,500 watts.
Since there are many differences in different types of hair dryers, you are not likely to know the wattage just by the look of your hair dryer.
3. How to find how many watts does my hair dryer use?
There are a couple of ways to know the wattage of a hair dryer.
Check out the hair dryer label or the package box.
Usually, there is a label printed on the dryer body, and it is the easiest way to see the wattage of your hair dryer.
When you have the package box or the Instruction manual of the hair dryer,
It’s another simple way to find out how many watts your hair dryer use.
See specs document online
If you have discarded the manual that came with the hair dryer, you can also google your hair dryer model on Google or Amazon to find the product’s detailed specs. It’s also a straightforward way to get the info you want.
Use Wattage measure tool (Not recommended)
If you are handy and good at handling electricity and power, you can measure the power consumption with a multimeter.
But if you are not, I do not recommend this way since it’s about safety issues.
Popular Brand Hair Dryers’ Wattage
For your reference, I will list some popular hair dryer models and how many watts they use.
Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryers: 1,600 watts
Remington D3190 Hair Dryer: 1,879 watts
CONAIR INFINITIPRO Hair Dryer: 1875 watts
BIO IONIC Goldpro Hair Dryer: 1875 watts
BaBylissPRO Ceramix Xtreme Hair Dryer: 2,000 watts
Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer & Styler: 1,000 watts
4. Higher Wattages, Better Hair Dryer?
When choosing a hair dryer, should we choose the hair dryer based on how high the wattage is?
The answer is “NO”. Although a hair dryer uses more watts, it does not mean it is a high-end hair dryer.
hair dryers with high wattage are hotter
Usually, hair dryers with higher wattage can produce more heat and dry your hair faster than low watts hair dryers. But that will also vary in the quality of hair dryers, some cheap hair dryer with low quality consume loads of power, but the performance does not match the watts.
Hair dryers with high wattage have more radiation.
Using hair dryers causes EMF radiation(Electromagnetic radiation). Blow dryers with higher wattage have stronger radiation, especially when you turn on/off.
By using higher watts, you will consume more power and electricity.
Like we’ve mentioned above, the watts are unit of power consumption. If your hair dryer uses more watts than other hair dryers, then you are consuming more energy as well.
You need to be careful with high wattage
What will happen if the wattage of the hair dryer exceeds the limit of the socket
Since we’ve known there are some hair dryers use more than 2000 watts, it’s important to check out the maximum load for your plug socket or outlet.
Let’s say if the max load your electrical outlet or circuits is 2400 watts, plugging a hair dryer use more than 2400 watts will cause potential hazards.
Ideally, the circuit breaker will work and cut off the power of the circuit. If the outlet is not a well-made one, the circuit may catch fire and cause Immeasurable loss.