We finally have our home energy use where we want it!

[TinyGiant]

i just did the energy wizard from my supplier and they said with all the things i checked off that we have in the house that our bill should be about 163 a month and in the summer we've had it as low as $75 (NO a/c) and in the winter it usually runs 100-110

so i guess we are at a good level :)

I'd like to replace the fridge with something newer .. ours just died and we picked up a side by side from CL for $300 it was in storage for 6 years but only used for a year before that. the owers purchased it at a house then started building a new house and it sat.

washer and dyer are older too it would be nice to reduce my water bill too .. but thats unavoidable with the screen printing shop here :( my water bill is usually 180ish per quarter

[BailOut]

Originally Posted by TinyGiant

I'd like to replace the fridge with something newer .. ours just died and we picked up a side by side from CL for $300 it was in storage for 6 years but only used for a year before that. the owers purchased it at a house then started building a new house and it sat.

washer and dyer are older too

I like to keep things efficient on both sides of the equation, meaning I like to see a monetary break-even point within a few short years. As such the idea of replacing a working appliance with a newer one often doesn't make sense.

We've achieved the efficiency we have even with a forced gas furnace, washer, dryer and refrigerator that are all in the lowest part of the Energy Guide spectrum. Let's use the refrigerator for my cost benefit example:

Even with our high cost for power, I learned during my audit that our refrigerator uses around $55 in electricity each year. An efficient replacement model would likely use 30% less energy, costing around $38 per year. That's a savings of around $17/year. A replacement unit would cost us around $1,200, so if I replaced our working unit the break-even point would be 70 years.

The break-even for someone that pays less for power would be much longer. Of course, some older refrigerators use much more power than our $55/year, so the math can be different.

As you can see, replacing a broken or failing appliance with an energy efficient one is well worthwhile, but that isn't always true for replacing a working one.