"Cash For Refrigerators" begins this fall - Dept. of Energy

My house is all-electric, no gas service, so it is automatically in the top electric rate tier.

ROI, with the minimum known replacement fridge acceptable to the spouse, would be ~38 years, excluding the winter heating effect. Counting that, ROI would be ~75 years (pre-heat-pump), or ~50 years (post-heat-pump).

I've been holding out for a fridge with a large enough freezer section to replace a 5 cu.ft. chest freezer, currently in the garage, saving an additional 400 kwh/yr. That would slash the ROI time.

Electricity was historically cheap here. The Enron 'California' energy crisis ended that, though rates are still below national average, and gas has risen enough that conversions are not compelling. The newer high efficiency electric heat pumps kill even gas.

My heating season is really 6 months, mid-October to mid-April. My cooling season this year, with Seattle's all-time record heat wave and high temperature, was literally 4 days, July 27-30. That new heat pump has a SEER of 21, but a box fan in a window at night handles all the rest of my cooling needs.

 

well gas aint such a geat deal any more. puget sound bills us both and i have gas heat and water heater, electric range. in summer gas is slightly less, in winter, its significantly more the electric.

around here, gas prices have way more than doubled in the last 5-6 years

 

Tripp, I keep forgetting that you're a UU. Here's a challenge that we issued to our congregation for the summer. "Seven steps for the seventh principle", a list of small things to do to reduce energy use. It was really to raise awareness more than anything else. We also gave out literally hundreds of packs of CFLs and about 50 cheapo power strips to kick the whole thing off. We're going to collect the scorecards in three weeks, at which point we'll make a guess as to whether or not we've had any impact.

 

I like the idea of using Kill-a-watts to point out how bad an old fridge is. Ours was using almost 100 kWh/mo! The current one uses about 1/5 of that. 2009 has been a banner year for us energywise. We've easily bested the previous years monthly consumption every month. In June we used 186 kWh! Partly, this is down to both a mild winter and a pretty mild summer, so it was always going to be better just because of that, but the new refrigerator plus a variety of other changes (I am no longer machine drying my clothes) have had a pronounced impact on our monthly bill.

 

Am I for the program? Probably not the way its written. As someone who is redoing an apartment anyhow (I would have to purchase the appliances regardless of the program) I will get free money from the government and I will take advantage of it.

I think a public service announcement pointing out that a new fridge will pay for itself would probably be a better idea.

 

it's a capitalization issue though. ROI is one thing, but if you lack the up-front capital you can't get the ROI. Folks on tight budgets can easily be trapped by their inefficient but paid for appliances.

 

I am curious if the math proves this to be true....

If a utility spent $1,000,000 buying up old appliances,
is this a better investment than spending $1,000,000 on additional capacity?

Of course the $1,000,000 investment in additional capacity would also include say another $1,000,000 in additional fuel costs over x years.

And the $1,000,000 investment in capacity increases the potential profit (more kWhrs to sell).

And if you add in the true cost of extraction and emmissions....

Too difficult of math for me, but I am curious!

But wait, WHAT IF, they spent the money on renewable capacity and had no future fuel costs and no hidden extraction / emission cost!

What if our public utilites only spent money on conservation and renewables???

Our local electric / gas utility used to be named "Public Service" but since they were just another greed corporation, they had to change their name.

 

all,

When we replaced our "fridge" a couple of years ago, the delivery people (private contractors) didn't want to take our 20+ yr old working-perfectly one away at all unless we paid them $100. Our electric company was offering to pay $50 for it though to be sure the freon (& everything else) got properly recycled.

The only problem with their program (& not mentioned in their advertising) was that when you called them (once you got your delivery "window" a couple of days ahead for your new one) they give you another phone number of a private company on the west coast to schedule the pickup (which could be anywhere from 2 weeks to a month).

In the meantime you have to leave the old one out by the street until they come for it. And when you get up late on the weekend or get home from work during the week & find it gone, how do you know if they got it so you will be mailed your $50 check or if 2 guys in a pickup truck grabbed it for use in their own garage or basement for their beer?

My wife didn't want to look at it by the street for that long wait for the electric company's contractors so we had to pay to have it taken away.

Ken (in Bolton,Ct)

 

Ken,

I could look at the fridge in the drive for a long time for $150. :biggrin1: My appliance dealer (very large volume) hauls them away for free if memory serves...except I wouldn't let them have mine as I knew I could resell it. I did quiz the driver some about what happened to what they hauled back. They had some sort of contract with a recycler and/or dealer for the used appliances.

If I was a driver and could get someone to pay me $100 to haul away a fridge that they reported to be in good working condition, I would end up several hundred dollars better off by the time I resold it.

 

Efficiency has the best ROI so I would argue that spending a $1M removing old, inefficient applicances would be VERY favourable to an additional $1M in capacity, even if there were no fuel costs.