Choosing an appliance on the numbers
We hold federal certification data for 13,974 appliances — what each one actually costs to run, from its own DOE or ENERGY STAR test. No star ratings, no sponsored placement, no opinion scores. Pick a category and it is ranked on that figure within each size and configuration class.
| Category | Models | Median per year | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Refrigerators | 9,326 | $69.48 | $7.91–$166.65 |
| Freezers | 1,841 | $72.50 | $25.80–$138.97 |
| Dryers | 1,219 | $114.49 | $22.97–$216.49 |
| Dishwashers | 1,198 | $45.19 | $15.06–$57.81 |
| Washing machines | 390 | $20.71 | $7.34–$58.56 |
Swipe the table sideways →
The thing worth knowing before you spend anything
Replacing a working appliance with a typical current one saves almost nothing. Across the models where we can run the full comparison, a new refrigerator is about $3.39 a year cheaper to run than the one it replaces (median across the 19 refrigerators where we hold both a repair record and a federal energy certification). The efficiency floor has barely moved.
The exception is a change of technology, not of machine. A vented dryer costs $114.58 a year against $43.12 for a heat-pump model — a $71.46 gap, and the only one in our data big enough to justify buying for efficiency alone.
So the honest summary of this entire site: repair it while it is worth repairing, and when it finally dies, what you replace it with matters far more than when.
If yours has just broken
Do not start here. Start with what is actually wrong with it — the median documented part across our whole corpus costs under $25, and most failures have a check that costs nothing at all.