Your Appliances account for about 25% of your homes energy consumption, with refrigerators and clothes dryers at the top of the consumption list.

When you cook a pot of rice in your kitchen for 1 hour, you use 1000 watts of electricity! One thousand watts equals 1 kilowatt-hour, or 1 kWh. Your home utility bill usually shows what you are charged for the kilowatt-hours you use. The average residential rate is 8.3 cents per kWh. A typical U.S. household consumes about 10,000 kWh per year, costing an average of $830 annually. There are a few home improvements that will let you cut down your energy consumption, or new appliances with an Energy Guide label will help you conserve energy.

How Much Electricity Do Appliances Use?

Did you know that your kitchen refrigerator uses almost five times the electricity the average television uses.

The Energy Guide label on new refrigerators will tell you how much electricity in kilowatt-hours (kWh) a particular model uses in one year. The smaller the number, the less energy the refrigerator uses and the less it will cost you to operate. In addition to the Energy Guide label, don't forget to look for the ENERGY STAR?? label. A new refrigerator with an ENERGY STAR?? label will save you between $35 and $70 a year compared to the models designed 15 years ago. This adds up to between $525 and $1,050 during the average 15-year life of the unit.

When shopping for a new washer in your home, look for a front loading (horizontal-axis) machine. This machine may cost more to buy but uses about a third of the energy and less water than a top-loading machine. With a front loader, you'll also save more on clothes drying, because they remove more water from your clothes during the spin cycle.

About 75% to 85% of the energy used for washing clothes is for heating the water. There are two ways to reduce the amount of energy used for washing clothes ??? use less water and use cooler water. Unless you're dealing with oily stains, the warm or cold water setting on your machine will generally do a good job of cleaning your clothes. Switching your temperature setting from hot to warm can cut a load's energy use in half.

Laundry Tips

• Wash your clothes in cold water using cold-water detergents when-ever possible.
• Wash and dry full loads. If you are washing a small load, use the appropriate water-level setting.
• Dry towels and heavier cottons in a separate load from lighter-weight clothes.
• Don't over-dry your clothes. If your machine has a moisture sensor, use it.
• Clean the lint filter in the dryer after every load to improve air circulation.
• Use the cool-down cycle to allow the clothes to finish drying with the residual heat in the dryer.