Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Kill-A-Watt

Late last week, I ordered a Kill-A-Watt from ThinkGeek to do a ROI cost-analysis on our refrigerator.

Our fridge is a hand-me-down from about 20 years ago, and it gave us a fit last week when I forgot to clean the coils. My fault, but it took it almost 24 hours to cool back down, and we lost some food out of it. During the ordeal, we weren't sure it was going to come back online -- and I had already been looking at new fridges. The theory is this:

1. The existing fridge (18.1 cu. feet) is about 20+ years old. A new fridge would be more energy efficient.
2. By purchasing a new fridge, I can cut down on our monthly expenses, which would yield a great ROI.
3. Needed tools to test my theory.
   

The Kill-A-Watt arrived yesterday, and I plugged it in for an hour, at which point it told me that my fridge used 0.4 kW/h. Whipping out my calculator / phone, I managed to figure that there's 8760 hours in a year, and .4 * 8760 is 3504 kWh's per year. We pay (after taxes, etc...) a total of $397 / year to maintain power to our aging fridge.

I looked around on HomeDepot (which we own stock in), and Sams Club (which we own stock in, and adore), and found out that the maximum we'd want to spend would be around $1350 (which uses 452kW/year, and would cost us about $50 / year in electricity) and a minimum of $870 (which uses 686kW/year, and would cost us about $77 / year in electricity).

The ROI for the expensive fridge is 3.9 years (45 months), at which point we'd be saving $345 / year in electricity.

The ROI for the cheaper fridge is 2.7 years (33 months), at which point we'd be saving $320 / year in electricity.

I was hoping for an < 12 month ROI, but no such luck. Anyone have any suggestions?

posted by Anthony Presley @ 1:47 PM