Got myself one of those wifi enabled plugs that doubles as an energy meter for my lights, and thought I’d plug my glowforge into it to see how much power it uses since there are several threads on measuring power usage but none with numbers in them. It’s a cheap plug and the app doesn’t do fancy graphs, so I just wrote down the numbers during various parts of operation once the power usage has stabilized (i.e., while in the middle of scoring or cutting a long continuous line).
Idle: 43.5W
Scan: 58.1W peak
HQ Scoring Proofgrade Maple Plywood: 191W
Cutting Proofgrade Maple Plywood: 367W
Exhaust On, No Laser: ~90W
My results are pretty similar to what Dan said in this thread. It never went above 400W (peaked at 370W) but I was only working on plywood and draftboard.
Overall in 2 hours of operation (with a lot of it idle as I edit files) making the stuff in these two threads I used 0.14 kilowatt hours. At $0.088 per that’s… $0.012.
I am very definitely not worried about power cost for the Glowforge.