Greg found the little gray box on the kitchen counter and asked if I'd bought a new garage door opener. It was a plug-in electricity meter, $25 at Lowe's. You plug it into the wall, plug an appliance into it, and it tells you exactly how much power that appliance uses over hours or days. I'd read about them for months and finally bought one.
I spent most of July going around the house with it, one appliance at a time, writing results in the green notebook. Our electric bills have been reasonable this year, but I wanted to know where the kilowatt-hours actually go now that it's just the two of us.
How I did it
For each appliance, I left the meter plugged in for at least two full days, then wrote down the kilowatt-hours. For things that run on and off, like a freezer, a couple of days gives you a fair daily average. Then I multiplied by about 13.6 cents, which is what we pay per kilowatt-hour all in, delivery and riders included, at our new 9.4-cent supply rate.
Here's some of what I found, rounded to monthly costs:
- Basement chest freezer, bought around 1996: 2.2 kWh a day, about $9.00 a month
- Kitchen refrigerator, from 2016: 1.1 kWh a day, about $4.50 a month
- Basement dehumidifier, summer only: 1.0 kWh a day, about $4.10 a month
- TV, soundbar and streaming stick in the family room, mostly standby: about $1.40 a month
- My laptop and the printer at the kitchen table: under $1 a month
- Coffee maker: about 70 cents a month, even with the warming plate
The freezer was the surprise. A chest freezer in a basement, sitting there quietly, costing twice what the kitchen refrigerator does.
Why the old freezer was so hungry
That freezer came with us in 1999 from the duplex we rented before this house, and it was already a few years old then. It held a lot of food over the years. When the kids were growing, it was full of meat from sales, frozen pizzas for the sleepovers, and the corn I put up every August.
When I opened it to clean it out, it had a two-inch shelf of frost along the inside walls, a seal that didn't close tight on one corner, and about a third of a load of food. Half of that was older than I'd like to admit. I found a bag of Christmas cookies labeled 2022.
An old freezer with a tired seal and thick frost has to work harder to stay cold. Older models were also simply less efficient than what's sold now. And a half-empty one has less frozen mass to hold the cold when the lid opens.
What we did about it
I looked at three options:
Defrost it and replace the seal. Maybe $40 and a Saturday. It would help, but it would still be a 30-year-old freezer.
Unplug it entirely. We gave this real thought. With just two of us, the freezer over the kitchen refrigerator holds most of what we need. But Greg likes to buy meat in bulk when it's on sale, and I'm not ready to give up my August corn.
Replace it with something smaller. A new 7-cubic-foot chest freezer, rated at about 250 kWh a year, was $229 at Lowe's with free haul-away of the old one.
We went with the third option. At 250 kWh a year, the new one should cost about $2.85 a month. That's a savings of roughly $6 a month, or $74 a year. So the new freezer pays for itself in a little over three years, and it takes up half the floor space in the basement laundry area.
Greg's main question was whether the new one would hold the same amount of meat. It holds less. He has accepted this, mostly.
What else I learned
Nothing else in the house came close to the freezer. Standby power on the TV and electronics is real but small, about $1.40 a month for everything in the family room. I put those on a power strip anyway, mostly because it's easy.
The dehumidifier runs only in the summer, and our basement needs it. I just turned it down from 40 percent to 50 percent humidity, which the meter says cut its use almost in half.
The meter now lives in the junk drawer. My next plan is to lend it to Patti next door. Ron has a refrigerator in their garage that he swears doesn't use much. I'd like to know.
