Appliance Running Cost Calculator

Before optimising an appliance it is worth knowing the shape of the whole bill, because appliances are not the largest part of it in most homes.

Heating and cooling typically account for something like forty to fifty per cent of a US household's energy. Water heating is usually next at fifteen to twenty. Everything this calculator covers — the fridge, the laundry, the kitchen — makes up the remainder together with lighting and electronics.

That matters for prioritisation. If your bill is genuinely high, insulation, air sealing and the thermostat will move it further than any appliance decision. This tool is for the part you can act on individually, and it will not match your whole bill because it deliberately does not cover heating, lighting or standby draw.

Within the appliance portion, the pattern is consistent. Anything that makes heat costs real money: the dryer, the electric water heater, the oven, resistance space heaters. Anything with a motor and no heating element is usually cheap. The kettle everyone worries about is a very high wattage for a very short time and costs less than people assume.

Once the numbers are in front of you, the ranking is usually clear and often surprising.

Line drying is free and halves the largest per-use load in most laundry rooms. It costs nothing but space and a little planning, and in summer it is barely an inconvenience at all.

Washing cold is close behind. The overwhelming majority of a washing machine's energy goes into heating water rather than turning the drum, so switching from warm to cold cuts its running cost by around seventy per cent. Modern detergents are formulated for cold water and the results are generally indistinguishable.

Turning off heated dry on a dishwasher saves roughly a third of its consumption for the cost of opening the door at the end of the cycle.

And for households with a pool, a variable-speed pump is usually the single largest saving available anywhere in the house — often several hundred dollars a year, because the pump runs for hours every day and speed affects power consumption disproportionately.

Time-of-use tariffs charge substantially less outside peak hours, and the saving is real but only applies to loads you can genuinely move.

Dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and EV charging all have timers or can be started late, and moving them costs nothing but a habit. EV charging in particular is transformative on a time-of-use plan, because it is both large and completely flexible.

What cannot shift is anything that runs when it needs to. A refrigerator cycles on temperature. Air conditioning runs when the house is hot, which is precisely during peak hours. A water heater can be shifted with a timer, but only if the tank is large enough to carry the household through the peak.

The calculator asks what share of your use you can realistically shift, and blends the rates accordingly. Setting it high because you intend to be disciplined will flatter the result in exactly the way this kind of tool should avoid.

Replacing a working appliance for efficiency alone rarely pays back quickly, with two consistent exceptions.

Very old refrigerators are the clearest case. Efficiency improved dramatically through the 1990s and 2000s, and a unit from that era can genuinely use three times what a modern equivalent does — while running continuously, which is what makes the difference add up.

Vented electric dryers replaced with heat-pump models are the other. A heat-pump dryer uses roughly a third of the energy, and for a household doing eight or nine loads a week that is a meaningful annual figure. The trade-off is honest: cycles take about twice as long, which suits some households and irritates others.

For most other appliances, the sensible approach is to buy the efficient version when the old one fails rather than before. The embodied energy and cost of a premature replacement generally outweigh the running-cost saving.