One year of refrigerator energy usage

We put a new GE 18 cubic foot refrigerator, a top freezer model, no icemaker, in service on 3/29/2011, so it's been in operation for just over a year. We'd searched for the lowest energy rating product, which was an interesting process in itself. It is rated at 335 kWh/year.

For the first complete year, the consumption was 295 kWh. I'm sure that some of the reason for being under the rating is that our household is only two people. A family would have more door openings, and would also have more food throughput. So perhaps the Energyguide rating is quite close.

I've mentioned before that the refrigerator and the freezer work harder in the warm seasons, as the case gains more heat from the surroundings, and the refrigeration system works harder to reject heat to the warmer surroundings also. Here's what about 13 months of daily data looks like:

Spikes are typically big cooking events, with lots of door openings, and some warm cooked food going into the fridge.

Comments

[Eric]

If I did it right that's about an average 33W draw?

I did a post remarkably similar to this, also with the energy star tag for the CEE Tier 3 fridge I found:

http://sandeen.net/wordpress/energy/going-beyond-energy-star/

The one I picked is rated for 324kWh/year, but in practice I'm averaging only about 18W average draw, or around 160kWh/year. I don't have the fancy per-circuit monitoring though, just a kill-a-watt over a month or so.

It's a basement overflow/beer fridge though, so opened really quite rarely, which would explain the much better performance.

Anyway, I imagine your fridge is also CEE Tier 3? It's currently the #4-ranked "large fridge" on toptenusa.org. I wish these units were better labeled in the store; it seems that especially with fridges, there are a lot of units that go WELL beyond the basic Energy Star requirements.

[Marc Rosenbaum]

Yes, average of 33W. Your beer fridge being in the basement may be the reason for low energy usage. Wat was the temperature down there during the Kill-a-watt monitoring?

[Eric]

Probably around 65F... That article was done around March, I've recently measured it again ... Hm, March again. Wish I had some permanent monitoring like you've got, that's pretty slick.

[Tom]

Thats great to see how you track your energyusage on your frig.
this is a perfect example how having a handle on everthing using energy can really save!