There are many questions that come up time and again when businesses are considering the costs of operating an ATM at their location. Among the most common questions is that surrounding ATM power consumption.
With today’s high energy prices, it’s important to understand the true cost to run the equipment that your business relies on each and every day.
When it comes to the electrical cost of your ATM, the good news is that the power consumption is probably much lower than you might expect. If you consider that the most common white label ATMs like Triton, Hyosung and Genmega are for the most part configured in the same way as a home computer it makes sense that an ATM consumes about the same amount of electrical power as most desktop PCs.
Like a basic desktop computer, an ATM has a power supply, a display (monitor), a mainboard, and an I/O board with various peripheral devices attached. As is the case with your home computer, the ATM has a printer attached (which is only used from time-to time). Unlike a PC, an ATM also has a cash dispenser, but the cash dispenser only draws power when a customer requests a cash withdrawal.
Although an ATM is always powered on, it is in fact in a stand-by mode more than 99.98% of the time, as it waits for a cardholder to request a transaction. During this idle time, the ATM is consuming ~25 watts of energy. It is only during a transaction that the ATM cycles the cash dispenser and utilizes the receipt printer at which time the draw increases to ~175 watts for less than 3 seconds on average.
When you compare the power consumption of an ATM to some common household appliances, it’s surprisingly low and unlike most other appliances an ATM actually generates income which more than offsets it’s electrical expense!
- Dishwasher 2,000 Watts
- Vacuum cleaner 1,400 Watts
- Coffee machine 1,000 Watts
- Toaster 800 Watts
- Microwave oven 750 Watts
- Furnace Fan 700 Watts
- 36″ Television 133 Watts
- ATM 25 Watts (99.98% of the time)
