My parents bought a new fridge a few years ago. After the first year the energy bill came in and it was drastically lower then the year before. A large part of the energy saving came from the new fridge. As I started to look into the savings, I learned some interesting developments in the household appliances sector.
This article is based on an old /r/thenetherlands post of mine
It is quite remarkable how much energy you can save if you replace and old fridge. For example if you replace a ~20 year old fridge, you can expect to save 300 kWh (or € 60) annually (source in Dutch).
This number probably doesn’t take into account any wear and tear of the old fridge, so the real energy saving might be even higher. In the case of my parents, the fridge’s motor would run constantly. So its likely that some of the energy savings they had were due to finally having a properly functioning fridge.
The reason that fridges have seen a such drastic reductions in power consumption are rules from the EU. For example you can see here (in Dutch) that between 1993 and 2007 fridges have became 44% more efficient. And a more recent trend shows that it didn’t stop there. Between 2004 and 2014, the average energy consumption of sold fridges went down from 309 kWh/year to 231 kWh/year!
Fridges are not the only appliances whose energy consumption went down over the years. Another nice example is vacuum cleaners. All this is due to the European Ecodesign Directive!
So in case you have an old fridge standing around, it might pay off to replace it.
Discuss: /r/thenetherlands