Just for the halibut I decided to look into buying a new refrigerator. The one I have is some 25 years old. It runs just fine; there's no reason to replace it, really. Except:
Really? So I did an experiment. Some years ago I bought a Kill a Watt energy meter from SmartHome. I think I paid $30 or $40 for it, certainly more than the current (pun intentional) price of $21.79, plus shipping.
On July 25 I plugged the refrigerator in to the energy meter. From then until today, October 28, it logged 226 kilowatt hours (kW·h). And that three months includes August. Most of the year my home is at 68℉. In summer the house is at 74℉. So 226*4=904 is a high estimate of my annual cost.
Next I sat down and waded through my (rather opaque) electricity bill to conclude that I pay about $0.046 per marginal kilowatt hour. In other words, it's costing me about $40 a year to run the thing. So assuming I could find a refrigerator that ran for free for $1,000 ($1060 after sales tax, less $30 from the power company), how long would it take me to recover the $1,000? Do the math.
This refrigerator is using some 900 kW-h. That's at the high end, but within the range of show room floor models I looked at. It's a little less than twice the most efficient models, but they are smaller and have a lot less volume. And those cost more than $1,000. Again, do the math.
Tell me again how much money I'm going to save by buying a new refrigerator. I'll pass. Oh, and that Kill a Watt meter? It now looks like one of the best investments I've ever made.
Maybe I can report my results at next year's Climate Fools Day conference.