Is This A Problem?

I constantly rely on a fan to keep me cool and drown out noise during the night. However, mother keeps telling me to turn the fan off when it gets cold during the winter because she worries about the electric bills going through the ceiling, yet there are numerous electrics in the house that are switched on but not actively used. I've been using a fan on a near-constant basis for well over a decade, but these past few years I've been told to turn it off when the temperatures get low.

Do you think she's right and I should turn off the fan during the winter, or do you feel that her complaints don't amount to much when other electricals in the house are continuously active?

Take a look at the fan where the power cable attaches. You'll probably find a small sticker there which will tell you how much power it uses (when on its maximum setting), in watts. Divide that number by 1000, because we want kilowatts. Now multiply that by how many hours you have it on each night. That'll give you a kilowatt hour (kWh) figure. The new energy price cap (from 1st January) is 28.62p per kWh. So multiply you previous figure by 28.62 to get the cost, in pence, for your fan usage each night.

That figure will either convince you that your mother does have a point and that perhaps you should moderate its use. Or it will convince your mother that it's not as expensive as she thought.

(BTW, the season is irrelevant - the fan will consume the same amount of power in summer as in winter; the only difference would be if you use it more in winter for some reason.)

I mean winter nights are longer, and maybe OP's mother doesn't want OP using a fan during winter when the weather is already much colder and they may perhaps be using heating (so the two kind cancel out)?

Winter nights are longer, but that doesn't mean that people sleep longer during winter. Do you sleep less in the summer and more in the winter? I know I don't.

Using a fan doesn't "cancel out" any heating which might be in overnight. (Do people actually have the central heating on overnight?) This is because a fan doesn't cool down a room, it merely provides airflow, and so moves the warm air from near your body (which you've heated-up by existing) to elsewhere in the room, which is replaced by cooler air which your body then heats up, which the fan then moves on, etc. So a fan doesn't cool the room - it simply moves around the air.

Those are both valid points. You're right, people probably don't sleep longer during winter. As for fans only providing airflow, you're right again but OP did state in their post that they rely on the fan to keep them cool - and wouldn't that be another reason to not use it during the colder months?