Fridges really do use a lot of energy!

Wow. I knew freezers used a lot of energy, but not that much!

As part of 'greening' the tea room we are replacing old refridgeration equipment. I have already ordered an new A+ rate fridge freezer to replace an old inneficient model with no rating and unknown provinence. Now i am looking at our two freezers that we use at home, these are mainly but not exclusively for the tearoom. What amazed me is that a new 'C' rated freezer that is as large as our old model uses 600KWh (estimated by manufacturer) a year. Bearing in mind our freezer is old, and like our fridge freezer has no rating it isn't unlikely that based on a similar method for estimation it might use >800 Kwh per year! Our energy use last quarter was around 950Kwh. Also, we have two freezers, the other is somewhat smaller. So it's quite possible that we use 800 + 400 = 1200Kwh a year for our freezers...we also have a home fridge.

So yes, keeping things cools seems to take a lot of energy even in Scotland. There have been a few purchases recently but hopefully a pair of new A+ rated freezers should make a dent in this problem. Each rated at 300KWh per year we could hope cut our freezer energy bill in half.

Two points on this:

1. These projected energy uses are far from great, when my Kill-A-Watt metre gets here i`ll do some day long checks but this all varies so much by the season that i`d need a whole year to do this as i`d like so i could have a good guide.
2. Getting rid of a freezer would be so much better than getting more efficient ones. I`m looking for a huge freezer as a compromise--for the same volume this would be lower on energy but i`m finding them very costly.
   

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Number One Breamar Road: Climate Action Plan

Climate change: bringing it home.

My parents run a tearoom, it is a small business, but there a a large number of small businesses and cumulatively they have a significant impact.

I`m currently working on a plan to reduce the t-rooms environmental impact significantly.

It's a rather odd situation, if i wanted solar panels then i could probably have pushed for them and got them installed already but they would be providing only a small fraction of our energy needs. It's energy efficiency first and second, i`m looking forward to solar panels soon though!



I don't feel like sharing this plan at the moment as I have just started. Also, there is a real problem with data we have general electricity bills but we don't know where all the energy is going. In order to solve this problem I  have just ordered a kill-a-watt metre so i can see where the energy is being consumed. You plug an appliance into the kill-a-watt and it into the wall, it give you KWh, watts, volts and cost of energy.

I also plan to by an Electrisave mains energy monitor that i can clip onto the
 mains cable it then transmits to a display panel that can be move around. I'll put this
on the counter hopefully it will start some conversations!

The wisdom of spending some cash on finding out the details of energy usage, and having live monitoring was reinforced by this fascinating article on the oil drum.



The Electrisave monitor, in particular is --i think-- a great idea. One of the key parts that i see
in this plan i`m writing is engaging with the customers. I cant see a better way to start than them asking what the electricity metre is doing on the counter!

You can either buy an Electrisave monitor for 69.99 or rent one for a month at 19.99, that's a pretty good idea if you are doing it for your own advantage at home and you just want to change those habits.

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