It feels like it takes forever for my partner to straighten her hair. She’ll spend hours every week carefully working on each lock of hair… During our upcoming vacation in an RV, she was keen to know if she could take her flat iron on the trip. At first, I was skeptical but then took the time to measure the power consumption to find the answer.
Below we will discuss and test hair straightener wattage, explain how to work it out for yourself, and calculate the total electricity required.
How Many Watts is a Flat Iron?
The average hair straightener uses between 70 and 300 watts.
The exact number depends on the size, model, and heat setting of your hair straightener. These devices do not run at a constant power level. The wattage will peak, fall, and pulse during usage.
When you first switch on the flat iron, the power draw is at its highest to quickly heat up the device. For the first minute it will exceed 250W, especially if you are set to the highest setting. Once up to temperature, the wattage drops dramatically to below 150W. You might also notice the power continues to rise and fall as the iron tries to maintain a constant temperature during usage.
How to Find Out Your Hair Straightener Wattage
There’s 3 ways you can work out the wattage of a flat iron.
- Check Product Specification
The quickest way is to look at the hair straightener’s specification. The watts (W) is usually written on a sticker on the base of the appliance. If not, you can check the user manual or the manufacturer’s website for technical details.
- Use a Wattmeter
A wattmeter is brilliant for getting a live wattage reading and tracking total energy usage of any appliance. You can simply plug it into your hair straightener to get instant information.
I used one to test my hair straighteners which gave a live reading of 398.8W while heating up.
- Wattage Formula or Calculator
If you know the amperage and voltage of your hair straightener you can use this to find the maximum watt rating. Simply use the formula Amps x Volts = Watts. Or you can head over to the ‘Watt Calculator’ to work this out.
Hair Straightener Wattage Test
How Much Electricity Does a Hair Straightener Use?
You can use hair straightener wattage to work out how much electricity it uses. Plus this can be useful in understanding how much it costs to run your flat iron.
A watt (W) is a measurement of power at a single point in time. A watt-hour (Wh) is the total amount of electricity used in an hour. For example, a hair straightener drawing an average of 150W would use 150Wh when running for an hour.
Happily, electricity bills are recorded in kilowatt-hours (kWh). A kilowatt is simply 1000 watts. So a 150W hair straightener running for 1 hour uses 0.15kWh.
In reality, you might use a hair straightener for 30 minutes a day. This means a hair straightener uses about 75Wh or 0.075kWh electricity a day. That’s 2.25kWh a month and 27kWh a year.
That’s an electricity cost of $0.011 a day or $4.05 a year to straighten your hair for 30 minutes every day.
Using a Hair Straightener Off-Grid
If you’re planning to use your hair straightener in an off-grid situation, like an RV or campervan, the information above is important. It enables you to pick the correct electrical equipment and know how long you can run.
You can either use a power inverter, portable power station, or generator to produce AC electricity.
To make sure everything runs smoothly you should check two things on this equipment – wattage capacity and total energy capacity.
Your power source, like an inverter, should have a wattage capacity of at least 20% more than your hair straightener. This ensures it will be able to deliver enough power as they are never 100% efficient. You must also ensure the inverter is pure sine wave so as to cope with the inductive load.
You might consider buying a low wattage flat iron to help reduce the requirements.
Secondly, you need to ensure your energy source, like a battery, has enough energy to run the hair straightener for the required amount of time. As we already know, it will use about 75Wh electricity for each usage. This is the equivalent to 6.25Ah on a 12V battery.
How Many Watts Does a Hair Straightener Use Summary
I hope you now have a clear understanding of how many watts a hair straightener uses.
As you can see, a flat iron can be a demanding device to operate. This is because the power draws pulses during usage. The overall electricity usage is not too dramatic even when used every day. But if you want to operate from a power inverter make sure you should make sure you have plenty of capacity to cope with the peaks. Plus you’ll need a pure sine wave output!
