Back in May, I was looking to buy a new flat screen computer monitor for my home office. After spending ten minutes searching online, I found the best deals at J&R Electronics and decided to go down to their Sunnyvale store to make sure that I could find a model that would connect successfully to my MacBook Air laptop. I was overwhelmed by the vast selection of flat screen monitors and really had no idea which one to go for after I narrowed my search down to a 23" size monitor and a budget of $200. My real dilemma was how to figure out which monitor was the most energy efficient.
Most of the models were Energy Star compliant, but without taking the time to do some serious research there was no quick way to know whether the Samsung, ASUS, ViewSonic, Acer, or HP model was the most efficient. In that moment all I wanted was for each monitor to have some kind of universal energy efficiency score so that I could easily pick the best one similar to how cars have an MPG (miles per gallon) rating comparing all the different makes and models. Since we had been working hard on an energy efficiency rating system at Enervee for some time, I jumped on our website to help me with my purchase. By sorting 23" monitors by energy efficiency, I settled on the as it was rated “very energy efficient”and had the best purchase price of $189 (down to $149 as of today). Decision made easy!
Enervee’s goal from the very beginning was to make energy efficiency practical so that you would not get frustrated trying to compare operating and standby watts and could just focus on buying the product that had all of features you were looking for. This led us to create the Enervee Score, a 0 to 100 (best) rating that ranks the energy efficiency of any product by comparing its energy consumption and capacity (i.e. size, volume, or processing speed). We decided to break down the score into three easy to understand categories: older models (0 to 50), fairly energy efficient (51 to 75) and very energy efficient (76 to 100). While the mechanics of calculating the score do get quite technical ( for the full details), the good news is that using the score is easy.
Basically, the higher the Enervee Score of any product, the less energy it consumes for its size and the more money you save on electricity costs. Let’s look at a quick example, a with an Enervee Score of 42 consumes about 5X more energy than a comparably priced that has an Enervee Score of 93. We’ll assume I live in New York City where the average residential electricity rate is 21 cents/kWh, the potential savings in my electricity cost for a 5 year period is $365 by choosing the Samsung TV. Now that’s if I’m watching the US average of 5 hours of TV per day.
If I have children at home who play a lot of video games and the TV set is on for 12 hours per day, the potential savings for the Samsung is almost $900 over 5 years. You can imagine that if I have 3 TVs at home, the savings potential gets into the thousands of dollars very quickly.
While we like to think of the Enervee Score as a great shopping tool, it is also a fun way to share energy efficiency with your family and friends. By taking the average Enervee Score of all the products you own at home, we can assign you a personal energy efficiency score. It’s not only a fun game to see who can be the most energy efficient, but it actually is very beneficial to our wallets and the environment. For now we have only released the Enervee Score for TVs, but refrigerators and dishwashers are on their way soon. We hope to have over 20 product categories scored by the end of the year.
