According to Uswitch.com, the comparison service, the two million UK houses with air conditioning units face a £71 million weekly energy cost as the year's first heatwave hits, with Brits spending roughly £3 million a week using desktop fans to keep cool.
Keeping cool has cost more than 75% more in the last two years as electricity rates have risen dramatically due to the energy crisis.
It costs 7p a week to run a desktop fan for an hour per day and 67p during hotter weeks when they are used for nine hours per day for the approximately four million households who use them.
Over 840,000 of the two million homes with air conditioning have built-in systems that may use up to 2.7kW. Households use their units for nearly three hours per week on average, but when temperatures are high, they use them for four hours 18 minutes during the day and four hours 48 minutes at night, increasing the cost from £2.43 to £56.76 per week.
Another million houses have portable air conditioning gadgets that utilise 1kW of power and are used for about two hours every week for 66p. This rate increases to £21.02 per week during the warmer months.
These households could save a large amount of money by using a desktop fan, which uses only 1% of the power needed by built-in air conditioning units, dramatically reducing energy expenses. This means that air conditioning customers who switch to a desktop fan could decrease their energy expenditure by 99%, saving them £56 each week.