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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