Cheapest and Most Expensive Appliances to Run Each Year | Hacker News Reader

Cheapest and Most Expensive Appliances to Run Each Year

moneytransfers.com

8 pointsgmays22 comments

So one thing about air conditioners - these have coefficient of performance greater than 1.

So they will definitely consume less power than a fan for removing a unit of heat from a home. Same with a heat pump vs electric heater. The heat pump uses less energy.

Fans do not remove heat. Fans actually add heat into a home. Unless if the fan is placed by an open window and it pulls in cooler air inside.

>Unless if the fan is placed by an open window and it pulls in cooler air inside.

Which is how many people use a fan, when it's hot out I open the windows in the evening and use 2 window fans to pull in the cool air, then close up the house in the morning to keep it cool. I haven't done the math on the COP, but I'm pretty sure it's much better than running the AC.

A fan in a room may not remove heat from the room but it can make it much more comfortable at a higher temperature, reducing the need to run AC.

I can turn on the ceiling fan in the room I'm in on "low" and turn the a/c for my entire house up 2⁰.

I'm pretty sure the fan is using less electricity...

It looks like they are basing their washing machine energy use on an old top loader. Newer top loaders should use less, and front loaders can use a lot less. They give 36 kWh per month for a family of 4.

I just recently replaced my 19 year old top loader with the second cheapest full sized front loader that I could find at local appliance stores (LG WM3400CW). It was about 30% more than the cheapest full sized top loaders. According to the energy label it uses 8.3 kWh per month for 6 loads. Most of the comparable front loaders were similar.

The top loaders I considered at were in the 15-20 kWh per month for 6 loads range. More expensive top loaders (about 20% more expensive than LG WM3400CW I bought) got down to around 10 kWh per month for 6 loads, almost as good as the WM3400CW.

After buying my house, the first hot month caused some panic when I got the electricity bill. I quickly ordered a zwave thermostat that I could control and wrote some quick code to optimize my costs a bit.

1. Dial the temperature back quite a bit during peak hours and just run the central fan. 2. Get alerts when the outside temperature is above or below the internal temperature (so I open/close windows at optimal times). 3. Pre-cool the house outside of peak hours.

Additionally I close vents downstairs during the summer, and use a box fan blowing outward at night. Those things brought my bill down over $50 each summer month.

Now if I could just get my trees to grow faster...

The only thing I found kind of interesting was comparing a single incandescent bulb to a 43" LED TV. Makes me wonder how much the old tube TVs used.

I kind of thought there would be more insight into the data, but the article just repeats the raw numbers after drawing very sweeping US-centric generalizations over five “regions” that were just made up.

The kettle is surprising. A kettle consumes what, like 3800w? The oven consumes 3k but is operated 4x as long.

The kettle can’t consume 10000w, it would throw most breakers.

In North America a kettle maxes out at 1500W, because we have 120V power and a standard circuit has 15A breaker (and especially older breakers are only rated for 80% continuous load).

The oven peaks at 3kW, but once it reaches the set temperature it will use much less than this, so it will use less than 3kWh/h. A kettle runs for shorter, but generally it runs full out until your water boils and then you unplug it.

> then you unplug it

Who unplugs a kettle? And why? Once it has stopped boiling it turns itself off.

> using an average of 3,000 watts per hour,

It doesn’t even use 3kWh per hour, since a stove’s peak usage is 3kW, and its average is much lower than this. Their price they give for running an oven is much lower than 3kW continuous too.

Their table at the bottom also appears to show prices per year, but kWh figures per… not year. Per month perhaps? The stove is listed at 21kWh which is suspiciously close to 3kW * 7h, which would make it a weekly figure, but that’s also clearly not the figure they’re using to get their annual price.

I think they mean 3000 watt hours per hour

> Kettle (15 mins/day)

Based on reddit conversations i didn't think kettles had made it out to the colonies yet?

a few here and there. i only found one i was willing to swap my stovetop one for this last summer.

Jeez $0.21/kwh for “pacific”? I know generally San Francisco is an outlier but I’m paying $0.39.

It probably includes the PNW / Bonneville crowd. I pay $0.066/kwh.

Devices that use more electricity cost more to run. News at 11. Why does this article exist?

Also advice like the following is ridiculous.

> if you live in a warmer climate you may want to swap out air conditioning for electric fans or even just opening the windows in the evenings

Oh ok. Instead of using something that works, waste electricity and suffer instead!

Air conditioners are assumed to run for 8 hours per day? With 100% duty cycle? They shouldn't have published without the data. But the concept is good!

I do want to know which appliances make the most sense to update for energy conservation: I only run my microwave for 60 seconds a day and the energy it uses goes into heating food, kinda pointless to update that. But if I had $1000 to update my fridge or my water heater or my dryer, which gives the most bang for the buck? Is there an order of importance that makes sense for most houses? Personally, I'd get out my old Kill-A-Watt and run a study, but I expect someone's already done that. This just isn't it.

You would look at the energy star data on the big yellow sticker for the cost of running the appliance. Or if that’s not a thing in your country, you’d lookup specs and do some maths.

This isn’t useful at all.

I think it's useful to put the relative impact of these various devices into perspective--it helps focus efforts to reduce energy usage on the parts that matter most. When we don't have this context, we tend to put outsize emphasis and burn goodwill where it doesn't matter--see, e.g., the focus on switching to plastic straws, which has relatively little impact on our plastic waste production, but does make a lot of people grouchy about having to change their habits.

This article falls under “consumer education.” You might think it’s common sense, but a surprising number of people don’t realize how energy intensive their appliances are.

I’ve lived without central AC for 5 years now, in a place with relatively hot summers. My experience is that AC helps for the hottest days (and especially nights) in the room I’m sleeping in; otherwise, central circulation with a fan is more than sufficient.

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