What an appliance actually costs to run
The yellow EnergyGuide sticker gives you one number at one national electricity rate. Your rate is not that rate — it ranges from about 12¢ a kilowatt-hour in North Dakota to 47¢ in Hawaii, so the same machine can cost four times as much to run depending on where it is plugged in.
Work it out for your machine
Enter the model number. We hold the certified consumption for it and can show what that costs at your state's rate — and what a current equivalent would cost instead.
How we work it out
- The machine's own certified consumptionIts DOE or ENERGY STAR test result in kilowatt-hours per year — not a category estimate and not a manufacturer claim.
- Your state's electricity priceEIA residential retail rates. We show the national figure by default and the full state range, because the spread is wider than most of the differences between machines.
- What would replace itA configuration-matched peer set from the same certified corpus — same style, same size class — so the comparison is like for like.
Every assumption above is ours and is stated. We do not use the “50% rule”, which has no traceable source and is widely misattributed to ENERGY STAR. See methodology.
Where the money actually is
Across most categories the difference between two current machines is small. Dryers are the exception, and it is a difference of technology rather than of brand:
| Dryer type | Models | Median per year |
|---|---|---|
| Vented | 1,074 | $114.58 |
| Ventless Hybrid | 80 | $76.67 |
| Ventless Heat Pump | 65 | $43.12 |
Swipe the table sideways →
A $71.46 a year gap, against a typical thirteen-year service life. On a $500 price premium that is roughly a 7-year payback — the only case in our data where buying for efficiency repays itself.