Image courtesy of Joe Tedesco

It would be interesting to see the figures upon which these estimates are based.

Bait & Switch

"one hour of ironing for 5 cents" seems to imply the following: An electric iron consumes about 1000 watts, so that's 1KWHour. So it must be 5 cents per KWH. Which would have been expensive back then....

Which makes 10 cents or 2 units seem like a lot of work with that vacuum cleaner.

'ise — I don’t have a date for the image, but John Carr at UTEC sent me some images including this one that shows a rate of 8¢/hour at 1kW demand, so I think a nickel/kWh could be in the ball park for the early part of the last century.

I don't know about US irons back then, but for a European iron of those days 300W would be much more realistic. Until the 1950ies there were hardly any loads exceeding 400W, except for electric heaters. Most sockets back then incorporated a 1 or 2A fuse, so that would be a max of 127/254 or 220/440W (Back then Austria used various voltages, I think they had 110, 127, 150 and 220, both DC and AC, I took the 127 and 220V figures). Most circuits were fused 4A.