Cold Outside and In

I finally believe it is fall. A one-day warm spell (it was as warm as 60 degrees yesterday) is over. The morning temperature is too cold for me to wear shorts when I walk the dog.

Naturally (?), my thoughts have turned to the cold inside, namely, my refrigerator .

With the purchase of our current house in 1994, my wife and I inherited a Sub Zero refrigerator. It was not new then and is certainly well-used now. It is big and looks nice as it is built into the kitchen. Its primary downside is that it is an electricity hog.

Replacing older refrigerators is often on lists of how to save energy (and money). When I ran mine through my Kill-A-Watt last April, it logged 51.22 kWh in 190 hours. At that rate, the old Sub Zero would use 2361.5 kWh in a year. Even with the pump for my pool (a real electricity sink), that comes to ten percent of my total consumption. That sounds mighty high.

I recently found a nice tool on the Energy Star web site: the Refrigerator Retirement Savings Calculator. Entering the amount I pay for a kWh of electricity (about 0.14) and the model number of my refrigerator (251RFD), the calculator gave me its estimate of its annual electricity usage (2,436 kWh), the annual cost ($341.00) and the potential savings over five years (more than $1,360) were I to replace the Sub Zero with a new Energy Star qualified model.

That’s good information to have. The estimated energy usage is only three percent higher than what I measured. The $1,360 savings might just about pay for the new unit, which would be cool.