Investigating Refrigerator Energy Usage
Feb. 15th, 2009 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebEnergy Star has what looks like a really good refrigerator energy usage comparison calculator. (Yikes, five nouns in a row! I'm so glad English is my first language, geez.)
It looks good because you can enter your exact refrigerator model and the exact amount you pay for electricity from your bill. When I do that, it tells me that I would cut my energy use in half and thus can save about $2 per month if I replace my awesome but twelve-year-old refrigerator with a new Energy Star refrigerator.
Interestingly, they say that my current refrigerator uses 688 kilowatt hours per year, but the big yellow sticker that came with my refrigerator says that it uses 598 kilowatt hours per year. I've come up with four possible reasons for this which are not mutually exclusive:
* Energy measuring methods have been improved, thus leading to different figures.
* My refrigerator is expected to have lost some efficiency over the years.
* Energy Star is deliberately overestimating the energy use of my old refrigerator to try to get me to buy a new one.
* The original figure was deliberately underestimated to try to entice me into buying that model.
Regardless, I am in no hurry to trade up.
That's even though my city will pay $50 to recycle an old but working refrigerator. I'd rather hang on to mine until it doesn't work and lose the $50. At a new refrigerator cost of $1000 earning only 2% interest, it would take only 2.5 years of putting off replacing my refrigerator to earn $50 anyway. Supposedly refrigerators last 15 years on average. Some of the more affordable new low-energy refrigerators are having trouble with their compressing going out prematurely.
However, part of me thinks that recessions are a good time to look for bargains in expensive things like Energy Star refrigerators.
One more relevant piece of data is that our next refrigerator will probably be bigger. Our current one is 18.5 cubic feet, which is on the small end of normal. It's located at the end of a counter, so we can fit in a new one of any width. We'd probably like to move up to at least 21 cubic feet which might just about cancel out any energy savings anyway.
Programming update - I have now completed nine of the twenty-four hours in my programming book. Everything still seems to make perfect sense, which is good.
I remember when I took a workshop on Javascript, I got totally lost during the discussion about array variables. They are just variables that have multiple data values such as test scores for 30 students. In that case, you might name the variable TestScore and the score for the first student would be at TestScore(1) and the score for the second student at TestScore(2), etc. What could be easier? But I seem to remember they were trying to use multi-dimensional ones, not one-dimensional ones like this one. Which means they could hold multiple test scores for each person. Um, still doesn't seem hard. Maybe it had four dimensions and they didn't explain well how to keep track of them. I don't know.
It looks good because you can enter your exact refrigerator model and the exact amount you pay for electricity from your bill. When I do that, it tells me that I would cut my energy use in half and thus can save about $2 per month if I replace my awesome but twelve-year-old refrigerator with a new Energy Star refrigerator.
Interestingly, they say that my current refrigerator uses 688 kilowatt hours per year, but the big yellow sticker that came with my refrigerator says that it uses 598 kilowatt hours per year. I've come up with four possible reasons for this which are not mutually exclusive:
* Energy measuring methods have been improved, thus leading to different figures.
* My refrigerator is expected to have lost some efficiency over the years.
* Energy Star is deliberately overestimating the energy use of my old refrigerator to try to get me to buy a new one.
* The original figure was deliberately underestimated to try to entice me into buying that model.
Regardless, I am in no hurry to trade up.
That's even though my city will pay $50 to recycle an old but working refrigerator. I'd rather hang on to mine until it doesn't work and lose the $50. At a new refrigerator cost of $1000 earning only 2% interest, it would take only 2.5 years of putting off replacing my refrigerator to earn $50 anyway. Supposedly refrigerators last 15 years on average. Some of the more affordable new low-energy refrigerators are having trouble with their compressing going out prematurely.
However, part of me thinks that recessions are a good time to look for bargains in expensive things like Energy Star refrigerators.
One more relevant piece of data is that our next refrigerator will probably be bigger. Our current one is 18.5 cubic feet, which is on the small end of normal. It's located at the end of a counter, so we can fit in a new one of any width. We'd probably like to move up to at least 21 cubic feet which might just about cancel out any energy savings anyway.
Programming update - I have now completed nine of the twenty-four hours in my programming book. Everything still seems to make perfect sense, which is good.
I remember when I took a workshop on Javascript, I got totally lost during the discussion about array variables. They are just variables that have multiple data values such as test scores for 30 students. In that case, you might name the variable TestScore and the score for the first student would be at TestScore(1) and the score for the second student at TestScore(2), etc. What could be easier? But I seem to remember they were trying to use multi-dimensional ones, not one-dimensional ones like this one. Which means they could hold multiple test scores for each person. Um, still doesn't seem hard. Maybe it had four dimensions and they didn't explain well how to keep track of them. I don't know.