(Credit: Darren Hester via Flickr)
Lots of people wonder what all the hype is about Energy Star appliances. Most people know that these appliances help you reduce your energy consumption. Using less electricity allows us to make more efficient use of our existing electricity supplies and cut back the amount of energy we need to produce. And producing less energy means significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, at least in many parts of Canada.
An Energy Star appliance will also save you money. Energy Star standards are designed so that the additional cost you pay for an Energy Star appliance is paid back via lower energy bills within the first few years of use. And Energy Star requires that increased energy efficiency does not come with cutbacks in functionality or comfort.
Beyond this, your purchase makes you a cost-cutting and comfy social revolutionary, because buying an Energy Star product helps to transform the overall market. Anyone who chooses an Energy Star-labelled appliance has given manufacturers one more reason to produce an energy-efficient product. And they are taking notice. In almost all cases, an increasing number of manufacturers have built products to meet the requirements of a given Energy Star standard after its introduction, raising the average efficiency of all appliances in that category.
And it's not just a one-time gain. Energy Star reviews and raises its qualifications regularly — not just when new technologies become available, but also when most of the market has increased its performance sufficiently to qualify for the existing Energy Star standard.
Over time, the progress in standards has been significant. The first Energy Star refrigerators were not nearly as energy efficient as the ones that qualify for the standard today, because the bar has been progressively raised — four times, actually — as technologies have improved. In fact, Energy Star has a rule of thumb that a new or revised standard should be tough enough that only the top 25 per cent of models will achieve the standard at the time it is introduced. And so the race toward efficiency begins again, spurred on by cost-conscious, planet-loving purchasers.
So look for the Energy Star label when shopping for that new light bulb or TV or fridge. You're not just saving some money for yourself; you're taking action in the larger energy-efficiency revolution.
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