Green Home: A Guide to Buying Energy-Efficient Appliances

There are so many ways to make your home green, starting with replacing your light bulbs with LED ones all the way to installing solar panels on the roof of your home. Still, while the latter costs about $17.000 and it is easy to dismiss as ‘too expensive for most households’, what about the choice of appliances?

The price difference between power-saving appliances and their standard counterparts is not really that great, so there’s no excuse for not making the planet-saving choice. After all, when something is both Earth- and budget-friendly at the same time, it is a chance too good to be ignored. With this in mind, here is a brief guide to buying energy-efficient appliances.

Think about the size

Even though this may seem a bit too obvious, you need to understand that bigger appliances use more power and more water, it really is as simple. A massive washing machine consumes more energy to wash the same amount of laundry, so, they’re not worth buying unless you really have the need for this. On the other hand, if you have 9 people living inside of your home, it might be more cost-effective and even eco-friendlier to get a bigger appliance than to be forced to re-use your old ones more frequently. Same goes for a refrigerator and many other appliances out there.

Repairing and replacing

Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that replacing your old appliances also creates waste, therefore increasing your household’s carbon footprint. In order to avoid this, you might want to contact experts behind agencies like Total Appliance repair and ask if it’s worth to repair an old machine. Keep in mind that an older appliance and fixture spend more power, which is why replacing them still might be worth your while in the long run. Nonetheless, replacing an item as soon as it misbehaves is definitely not a good idea.

Compare estimated energy use

When it comes to picking an appliance in 2018, it’s quite easy to be efficient, seeing as how all of these devices have a displayed estimated energy use. This means that you can make a side-by-side comparison on your phone or laptop. In this way, you can make a calculation of how much you stand to save in a month or a year. Then, try to calculate how long will it take until this device covers its own cost. Sure, this isn’t always the case since you might replace it beforehand, yet, the cost reduction is always a thing worth keeping in mind.

Look at the label

Finally, this is a rule that’s applicable to both electronic devices and water fixtures. A truly green device usually has an Energy Star logo (at least in the U.S.). This symbol alone is an indicator that the device you’re looking at stands to save you quite a bit of cash. Nevertheless, there is a great difference even between various power-saving appliances and, seeing as how this is not a purchase you’re making every day, it’s always worth getting into the specifics.

As we stated in the previous paragraph, renewing your household appliances is something you do once every several years, perhaps even once every decade. This means that the choice you make right now is the one that’s going to affect both your household budget and your conscience for years to come. After all, how can you justify ignoring the ramifications of your laziness on the environment, especially in the era of the internet, where all of this information is merely a click away.