Your choice of appliance – and how you use it – can cut your energy use and bills.
Plug-in appliances account for an average of 25% of total residential energy consumption across Australia. In some cases, home appliances account for nearly 50% of all energy use in a home, and 45% of total Lifecycle Carbon Emissions (LCE) over the home’s 50-year life. However, this proportion will vary by household depending on the climate, the types of appliances in your home, and the way they are used.
When weighing up the cost of your appliance, often the initial price does not tell the whole story. You could save a considerable amount of money over time by looking at running costs as a ‘second price tag’ and choosing products accordingly. Many appliances with a less expensive purchase price may end up costing you far more in energy costs over the lifetime of the product. You’ll be paying on that second price tag every month with your utility bill for the next 10 to 20 years, depending on the appliance. Refrigerators last between 10-20 years; clothes washers between 7–12 years (top loading), 12–20+ years (front loading); and air conditioners last about nine years.
Choose appliances and technologies that suit your needs and that use the lowest number of watt-hours or megajoules. Avoid the lure of upgrading to bigger products or those with more features you may never use. These can lock you in to costs for years to come. Washing machines are an essential appliance, but in our modern world, home entertainment gear seems just as vital. Washing machines, dryers, TVs, and gaming consoles can all be power-hungry appliances, depending on how they’re used. It’s worth thinking about the energy consumption when selecting your next big screen TV, or when choosing a washing machine. Likewise, the best clothes dryer is the sun, and it costs nothing to run, so line dry your clothes wherever possible. That’s not always an option though, so for many a clothes dryer is an essential appliance.
Some people are concerned that the energy savings gained by replacing an old appliance may be cancelled out by the energy required to manufacture the new one. This is usually not a significant issue for appliances since conserved energy usually exceeds the embodied energy of the new appliance within a few years. This relies on on the newer models being much more energy- and water-efficient than the appliances they replace. Replacing very old, inefficient appliances is usually a straightforward decision. Replacing a relatively more modern appliance (for example, a rather new instantaneous gas water heater) is less straightforward.
If the old appliance is recycled, much of the energy used in its manufacture can be recovered. Recycling offsets the need for new materials, which generally require a lot more energy to produce than simply recycling existing materials. For fridges and air conditioners, high climate impact refrigerants can be recovered, instead of leaking into the atmosphere as the appliance ages.
While replacing existing working appliances with more efficient versions can be beneficial in some circumstances, it is particularly critical that appliances at the end of life are replaced with efficient, electric models.
Here’s a Renew article on what to consider when buying and using appliances.
