We’ve been working hard on expanding the Enervee Marketplace to cover more categories and also updating our scoring algorithms to help you find the best models. With the drought in California, we are planning to launch the Enervee Score for water-saving products very soon. Stay tuned!
You may remember from our that ENERGY STAR introduced new specifications for refrigerators and freezers based on new Department of Energy federal standards. These standards changed how annual energy usage for refrigerators gets tested related to compartment temperature settings and features such as automatic defrost or installed ice maker. The result was that the annual energy usage increased by 100 to 200 kWh per year for many models.
We have been monitoring the refrigerator category since the new standard came into effect and noticed that these changes have had a significant impact. For example, the 20.7 ft3 French Door fridge previously had an annual energy use of 400 kWh/yr, but after the new standard, it has been updated to have an annual energy use of 573 kWh/yr. This caused a big drop in the Enervee Score for this model and many others.
To calculate the Enervee Score, we compare each model’s energy usage to the baseline for the category. The difference each model is from the baseline is what determines how high or low a score each product receives.
Recently, we have noticed that the average Enervee Score for refrigerators has dropped below the normal range from last year. Our data team has worked hard on improvements to the algorithm to reflect the new fridge baseline resulting from the Department of Energy standard. This ensures that the majority of new models are scoring above 50 and you may notice that the scores on many models have changed.
When shopping, remember that models with an Enervee Score of 75 and up have very good energy usage and that 90+ has ideal energy usage. We also created to help make finding a new fridge easy. Don’t hesitate to if you have any questions about what to look for when trying to find an affordable and energy-efficient fridge!