Fridge/Freezer KWH

lightfoot256

So I've been goin around the house armed with my new Current Cost meter and reduced my electricity consumption by over 3 quarters! (down from ~900w to ~200w). The main switch was getting rid of the old incandescent light bulbs and replacing them with energy savings ones; The only thing I'm left with is some an old fridge and freezer the previous owners left for us.

I've been looking around at new fridge/freezer combos and they advertise such things as 220KWH/Year, which seems incredibly low.

My Fridge and Freezer sit around ~200w (combined) and every 3 or so minutes jump up to ~400w (combined) and lasts for about 2-3 minutes. So on average I'd guess that they're using about ~300w constantly. Over a 24 hour period that's 7.2KWH or about 2500KWH/Year! (Or £300).

Am I looking at the new fridge/freezer readings wrong? Or is it about time I bought a new one and saved a whole bunch of money on electric bills??

I also think the F/F energy consumption correlates to the house temperature; I've noticed on warmer days or days where the heating has been on a while (but isn't actually on at the time) the firdge freezer seem to guzzle a lot more energy; you can definately tell by the fact that they buzz quite loudly when they're "on".

Cheers,
Chris

Cardew

You just cannot measure the consumption of any appliance with one of those meters - they are quite useless for that purpose.

You really need to buy a £6 -£10 plug in meter and monitor over 24 hours or so.

How do you know the 200w is from the freezer if it is displaying 200w all the time?

Unless the Fridge freezer is seriously faulty it cannot use 200w constantly and 400w some of the time - it would either be a solid block of ice, or if it has no coolant, nothing gets cold.

300kWh per year is perfectly reasonable for a new appliance, but I doubt if even old appliances would use more than double that.