What does a golf simulator cost to run?

Everyone budgets for the launch monitor and the enclosure. Almost nobody budgets for the electricity. Here is a full breakdown of what a home golf simulator draws, what a year of it costs, and how much of that a plug-in solar kit can offset.

Component by component

A simulator is not one device, it is six or seven running together. The figures below are typical continuous draws while playing, not peak nameplate ratings.

The equipment total

Add the non-heating rows and a mid-range setup — laser projector, mid-tier gaming PC, camera launch monitor, one screen, LED bay lighting — sits somewhere around 700W to 1kW while you are hitting balls. A high-end PC with a power-hungry graphics card and a bright lamp projector can push past 1.2kW. A modest build with a laptop instead of a tower and a radar monitor can come in under 500W.

The one that dwarfs everything else

If your simulator lives in a garage, a garden room or an outbuilding, heating is the real bill. A concrete-floored garage with an uninsulated roller door is a genuinely difficult space to warm, and most people reach for a 2kW or 2.5kW fan heater or an infrared panel. Run one for two hours to make a winter session bearable and you have used 4–5kWh before the projector has drawn a single unit.

In other words: from roughly October to March, heating typically costs more than everything else in the room combined. Anyone comparing simulator running costs without mentioning heating is quoting you the summer figure.

A worked annual cost

Assume a keen but realistic user: six hours a week, all year, so around 310 hours. Take 27p/kWh as the electricity price — check your own tariff, as rates vary.

• Equipment at 850W average: 0.85kWh × 310 hours ≈ 264kWh ≈ £71 a year.
• Heating: say 150 of those hours fall in the colder half of the year, with a 2kW heater running about 60% of the time. 2kW × 150 × 0.6 = 180kWh ≈ £49 a year — and that assumes a reasonably insulated space. A cold garage warmed to comfort can easily double it.
• Standby and always-on kit: 20W around the clock adds about 175kWh ≈ £47 a year. Switching the bay off at the wall removes most of this.

Total: roughly £120–£220 a year for a typical setup, with the spread driven almost entirely by how cold the space is and whether you leave things on standby. Heavy users in a poorly insulated garage should expect the top of that range or above.

What an 800W plug-in kit offsets

An 800VA plug-in solar device produces up to 800W at any moment, and only while there is daylight. Against a 700W–1kW equipment load, that is a strong match — a daytime session in spring or summer can be running largely on your own generation. Against the heater, it is not close: a 2kW heater is more than double the entire device output.

The awkward truth for simulator owners specifically is timing. Most people play in the evening, in winter, when there is no sun at all. That does not make solar pointless — the generation still flows into your household circuits and offsets whatever else the home is doing at that moment, from the fridge to the dishwasher — but the direct simulator-on-sunshine story only works for daytime play.

Who gets the most from it

• Shift workers, retired players and anyone who practises during the day.
• Setups with a garage freezer or fridge running 24/7 alongside the bay.
• Weekend players who hit balls on a Saturday morning rather than a Tuesday night.

On the government's modelling, a south-facing device at 30° generates around 690kWh a year, of which roughly 428kWh is typically self-consumed, worth about £110 annually at the assumed price — see the DESNZ plug-in solar impact assessment and our savings breakdown. Set against a £120–£220 simulator bill, that is a meaningful dent rather than a cancellation.

Practical ways to cut a simulator bill

• Move to a laser projector when the lamp unit dies — lower draw, no lamp replacements.
• Cap the frame rate in the simulator software. A GPU rendering 240fps for no visible benefit is just a heater with a fan.
• Put the whole bay on one switched extension for equipment, so standby is zero.
• Insulate the garage door and the roof before buying any heater. It is the highest-return spend in the room.
• Heat the bay, not the building — a directional infrared panel aimed at the hitting area beats warming 40m³ of air.

A note on the extension lead above: that is for your simulator equipment only. A plug-in solar device must go directly into a socket outlet and never into an extension lead — see the installation guide.