Will a new fridge-​​freezer save electricity, money?

So, a quick flick through my past posts reveals that, accord­ing to me, roofs are rub­bish, rain is rub­bish, fest­ivals are rub­bish, digital cam­eras are rub­bish, mobile phones are rub­bish, broad­band is rub­bish, cars are rub­bish and even rub­bish is rub­bish.

In short, modern life is rub­bish, except when it comes to fridges. Fridges are ace.

I won’t bore you again with the trials of living without one for a month, but my energy-​​saving chal­lenge was made easier by the fact that the old fridge broke at the start. I’d had half a mind to replace it, though, ever since I hooked it up to one of our power meters and dis­covered that it was using an incred­ible 15 kilowatt-​​hours (kWh) of elec­tri­city each week: enough to run my kettle for more than seven hours.

That had never seemed right to me, and I wanted to see whether a new replace­ment would really be that much better, or whether makers’ energy-​​saving claims are all just hot air.

Before I could find out, the old item had to be car­ried down the three flights of stairs from my flat, and a newer, unin­ten­tion­ally bigger ver­sion man­handled back up. This required the street-​​level removal of all of the replacement’s pack­aging, the sign­ing of a damage dis­claimer, and an almost super­hu­man effort not to upbraid the deliv­ery man for his insist­ence that it wasn’t going to fit until it already had.

If the first thing I learned from my new fridge-​​freezer was that it is chief among the things you don’t want to carry into a third-​​floor flat, the second was that modern examples are very, very good. After a quick wipe down, I hooked it up to the energy meter and set about load­ing it up with all the things I’d missed so much in my fridge­less month. Chiefly beer.

Fridge over troubled water

After the first day – much of which would have been spent work­ing hard to get everything down to tem­per­at­ure – it had used 1.45kWh, which seemed a prom­ising start. And des­pite extra demands from freez­ing bucket-​​loads of ice cubes, and left-​​over chilli and pasta sauces, at the end of the first week the meter was show­ing just 6.34kWh – less than half the elec­tri­city my old fridge would have used in the same time.

In the second week it only got through 5.05kWh, while in week three con­sump­tion was down to just 4.89kWh – less than a third that of my old fridge.

I’m impressed, frankly. New Fridge is bigger, colder and better than the old one, and yet it uses just a third of the power: It’s likely to save me more than ?

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• LG Under The Gun for Cheat­ing on Energy Effi­ciency Test­ing (tree​hug​ger​.com)
• I’ve cut my elec­tri­city use because I can meas­ure exactly how much I’m using. I want to do the same for heat­ing oil, but … (slate​.com)

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​11-​​05 05:22:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Business, Electricity, Energy, Energy conservation, Kilowatt hour, Refrigerator, Temperature, Utilities
Posted in Energy | View Comments

Discovering how to balance energy efficiency and style in a Victorian house

In part two of his invest­ig­a­tions into how to make his Vic­torian ter­raced house more energy-​​efficient without com­prom­ising its fea­tures and char­ac­ter, our guest blog­ger, Simon Mustoe, finds a few sur­prises cour­tesy of the Energy Saving Trust (EST).

Last week, I went public with a homeowner dilemma: I whole­heartedly sub­scribe to energy-​​saving prin­ciples but am not really pre­pared to do any­thing that com­prom­ises the char­ac­ter of my Victorian-​​era house. I lit­er­ally couldn’t bear to watch someone rip­ping out the ori­ginal wooden sash win­dows in favour of double-​​glazing, or cov­er­ing up a beau­ti­ful ori­ginal wooden floor with carpet. In fact, I think I had uncon­sciously decided that there really wasn’t much I could do to con­serve energy in a house that was built over 100 years too early to bene­fit from environmentally-​​conscious build­ing prin­ciples. Appar­ently, the first step in beat­ing a prob­lem is to admit that one exists, so I’m facing up to my pre­vi­ous assump­tion and put­ting it to the test.

Given that the Energy Saving Trust is host­ing Energy Saving Week I made it my first port of call. A little dig­ging around its web­site led me to a list of ways to insu­late the walls and floors of a house. I was pleas­antly sur­prised by what I found. For instance, I hadn’t real­ised that I could actu­ally insu­late solid walls, a fea­ture typ­ical of Victorian-​​era houses. Appar­ently I can – both inside and out, although doing both would count as excess­ive. What’s more, each option would save in the region of two tonnes of carbon diox­ide (CO2) emis­sions each year, which equates to around ?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​22 01:51:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Energy, Energy conservation, Energy Saving Trust, Environment, Insulated glazing, Sash window, Terraced house, Victorian architecture
Posted in Home | View Comments

All power to the shower: Paul pulls the plug on his no-​​bath energy saving challenge

Guest blog­ger Paul Pritchard is UK head of cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity for MORE TH>N’s parent com­pany, RSA. He agreed to give up his beloved baths as part of our energy-​​saving pro­ject, and share the highs and lows with us on Living.

Having steeped him­self in lit­er­at­ure for the com­fort denied him by the shower, his month of abstin­ence is now at an end. But has it changed his habits for good?

It’s over. I man­aged to com­plete my month.

OK, so it doesn’t really com­pare to a month without a fridge but I reckon it has taught me some­thing and I will def­in­itely change my beha­viour going for­ward. It ended with a bit of a whim­per as I had pretty much got used to the occa­sional shower routine, but still really nice to know I can now enjoy the odd indul­gence again. I don’t think I will be doing the five-​​minute mid­week baths though – a quick shower serves equally well (I never thought I woud say that. Also I do actu­ally wonder if maybe we wash and shower too much – as a kid I used to wash my hands and face before I went to bed and that seemed fine.)

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​11-​​10 08:15:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Bathroom, Corporate social responsibility, Energy, Energy conservation, Home and Garden, Paul Pritchard, Shopping, Technology
Posted in Energy | View Comments