Appliance Electric Usage
These days everyone is interested in saving money on their energy bill, whether you use electric, gas or oil. Prices have gotten pretty high and everyone would like to be able to save a little money. One way to do this is to buy appliances with lower appliance electric usage.
The first thing you want to look for when searching for appliances that use less electricity is the Energy Star seal. Energy Star appliances use less energy than similar non-Energy Star appliances, so this is a good way to lower your appliance electric usage. Energy Star appliances do tend to cost a little more at the store than regular appliances, but you will quickly make up the difference in price through lower energy bills, so it is worth it in the long run to buy these appliances.
If you can't afford to buy Energy Star appliances, or if you want to choose the Energy Star appliance with the lowest appliance electric usage, you can check to see how much energy the appliance uses. You can usually find the wattage for an appliance on the name plate of the appliance. The more watts that an appliance uses, the more energy it uses, so you can look for a low number here if you are trying to minimize energy use. For example, if there are two refrigerators you like, you can check to see how many watts they need to run and choose the one that has the lower watts in order to buy the refrigerator with the lowest appliance electric usage.
In many cases, smaller appliances will have lower appliance electric usage than larger appliances, so when you are considering your choices you should take this into account. Do you really need a huge refrigerator, or would a smaller model suit your needs just as well?
Appliances with more bells and whistles are also likely to have higher energy needs, so in order to lower your appliance electric usage you might want to choose the refrigerator that doesn't have the automatic ice maker and water and ice dispensers since these will be likely to make it so that the refrigerator will need more energy to run, and your energy bill will therefore be higher.
In summary: in order to buy the appliances with the lowest appliance electric usage, you should look for the Energy Star label, and then check to see which uses the lowest watts. You should also seriously consider how big an appliance you need and whether or not you really need all the extra features since size and extra bells and whistles increase energy usage.
