LED wall running cost calculator
What a wall costs after the invoice: electricity per year, maintenance, spare cabinets and how long it lasts at your hours — with total cost of ownership per year and per square metre.
The formula
annual kWh = cabinets × avg W ÷ 1000 × hours/day × days/year — energy, then × tariff for the yearly bill.
TCO = hardware + N × energy + N × maintenance + spares where maintenance is a percentage of hardware cost per year and spares are a percentage of the cabinet count, bought up front.
service life = lifetime hours ÷ annual on-hours — the years until the wall reaches half brightness.
Worked example
Twelve 500 × 500 mm cabinets (a 3 m² wall) at 150 W average, running 16 hours a day all year, at €0.30/kWh, costed over 5 years, with the hardware quoted at €18,000:
The wall averages 1,800 W across 5,840 on-hours, so it burns 10,512 kWh a year — €3,154 annually, €15,768 over five years. At 100,000 hours it reaches half brightness after about 17 years of that duty cycle.
Maintenance at 2% adds €360 a year (€1,800 over the term) and a 5% spares provision means 1 spare cabinet at €1,500. Total five-year cost of ownership: €37,068 — €7,414 a year, or about €2,471 per m² per year. Electricity alone is 43% of that five-year total — and 83% of everything spent after the invoice.
Frequently asked
- Should I estimate energy on maximum or average power?
- Average. Maximum is full-white output — it decides your circuits and breakers, but real content almost never sustains it. Average power is typically 30–40% of maximum, and that is the figure that predicts the electricity bill.
- What does a 100,000-hour lifetime actually mean?
- It is L50: the point at which the LEDs have dimmed to half their original brightness, not the point at which they fail. The wall still works afterwards, it is just dimmer and harder to colour-match. What turns those hours into years is your duty cycle — 100,000 hours is 17 years at 16 hours a day, but under 12 years running 24/7.
- What maintenance percentage should I assume?
- For a serviced fixed installation, 2% of hardware cost per year is a reasonable planning figure — covering module swaps, receiving cards, fans and periodic recalibration. Rental and touring stock takes far more punishment: 5% is a safer starting point. Both are adjustable here because the honest answer depends on your service contract.
- Why buy spare cabinets up front?
- LEDs are binned by colour and brightness at manufacture, and batches drift. A cabinet bought two years later will very likely not match the wall it joins, even from the same product line. Buying roughly 5% spares with the original order is far cheaper than a visible patch — and it is why spares belong in the purchase, not the repair budget.
- Does this convert between currencies?
- No. The currency selector only changes how figures are labelled and formatted — your tariff and hardware price are read exactly as you type them. Enter everything in one currency. Demand charges, standing charges and taxes are also out of scope: this models consumption.
Design the whole wall
The full calculator does this and everything else — real cabinets, wiring diagrams, validation. Free, no account.