Power-hungry appliances that might be costing you

Power company Genesis has taken aim at incandescent light bulbs, but energy experts say there are other things that are also needlessly draining household power budgets.

Genesis chief revenue officer Stephen England-Hall told RNZ it wanted a ban on the bulbs.

"One dollar of electricity buys you 250 hours of LED lighting, but it also will buy you 25 hours of incandescent bulb lighting, so it's 10 times better to have LED bulbs than incandescent bulbs," he said.

Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority lead adviser Gareth Gretton said incandescent bulbs were a special case because they were "staggeringly inefficient" compared to the modern alternative of an LED bulb.

"There is a technology that is just so much better that you're better off throwing what you've got in the bin… even if you've just bought an incandescent bulb you really should just stop using it and buy an LED bulb because the payback is so good."

But he said heat pumps were similar.

"People are super familiar with using heat pumps to heat our homes but there is a couple of other places where heat pumps are appearing now. One of them is for heating hot water. The second is for drying clothes.

"Now you have heat pump clothes dryers, much like heat pumps for space heating, you do have that step change in efficiency where the heat pump is going to be using roughly one half to a third of the electricity of the alternative.

"What's a bit different with the cost-benefit equation for heat pump water heaters and heat pump clothes dryers is it really depends how much you're going to be using these things. The efficiency is a bit more expensive…. If you're a household that uses quite a lot of hot water and does quite a lot of clothes drying then it is absolutely worth looking at getting those particular types of appliance."

Fridges had also become a lot less expensive to run.

He said a new fridge could cost $100 a year to run compared to $200 for an old fridge.

"The thing we'd say is not to keep the old one. A lot of people might buy a new fridge and think I'll hang on to the old one, put it in the garage… It ends up running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year and chewing through $200 of electricity as well as the new one. If you're going to hang on to an old fridge, just use it when you really need to."

Consumer NZ said having one of each major appliance would add about $30 a month to household power bills.

"The biggest opportunities for savings are often in refrigeration, hot water use and reducing unnecessary standby power."

Consumer said even a fridge that was 15 years old could cost about 31 percent more to run than a new one.

"While Consumer NZ generally doesn't recommend replacing appliances before they fail, refrigeration is one area where an old appliance can be an exception because it never gets switched off."

Spokesperson Gemma Rasmussen said people sometimes thought it was cheaper to wash dishes in the sink than run the dishwasher, but a modern dishwasher would cost about half as much as handwashing.

Both Rasmussen and Gretton said people buying new appliances should look at how energy-hungry they were. Gretton said it was sometimes the case that a more efficient model would be no more expensive.

"That kind of makes the decision pretty easy really."

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