Recently, the author was at a friend’s house. They had a pair of fridge/freezers that looked fairly similar, both about the same height, roughly the same storage in each – but he’d left the energy stickers on both units and one thing really stood out

While both are ‘A+’ rated (which is a great start), the actual energy consumption figures are rather different. 255 KWh per year against 331 KWh per year. Granted, this is manufacturers data and probably doesn’t map exactly into real life – but both these units were made by the same company so the tests should be broadly the same.

Now, we don’t want to get into the whole ‘how much does a KWh cost today’ thing – but just for sake of comparison, if we were to buy both these fridges and run them for a year at today’s costs, we get this:

255 x £0.34 = £86.70 and 331 x £0.34 = £112.54

In short, the fridge on the left will cost our friend around £25 a year in electricity less than the near-identical one on the right.

The moral is that it’s well worth looking at both energy efficiency and energy consumption data when you’re looking at buying new items, especially things like fridges and freezers that you have to leave running constantly.

The purchase price is only half the story; figure how much it’ll cost to run and try to add that into your decision. Now open the fridge on the left and we can both have a cold one while we think it all over.