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Higher efficiency class = save money?
When is it worth replacing household appliances?
Photo: Zacharie Scheurer / picture alliance / dpa-tmn
A widespread thesis is that buying energy-efficient household appliances saves money in the long term.
Basically that's also true.
However, "long-term" is a flexible term in this context: Depending on which device you buy and how you use it, it can take 3 to 19 years before you have saved the purchase costs again through lower consumption.
This results in a comparison of more than 1900 household appliances that the portals Verivox and Testberichte.de carried out and that SPIEGEL was able to see in advance.
If you replace a
washing machine
in efficiency class A ++ with one of the next better class A +++, you will benefit on average after 2.8 years - if you include the electricity and water costs saved.
It takes just as long to replace a
fridge-freezer
.
With a
dryer
, however, purchasing the highest energy class is only worthwhile after around 8.2 years.
In a
dishwasher it can take
18.9 years.
According to Verivox, the large fluctuations in the amortization times result from the different high price surcharges between the energy labels A ++ and A +++.
While the surcharge for washing machines, fridge-freezers and dryers is between 9 and 22 percent, consumers pay an average of 51 percent more for dishwashers.
In addition: the power consumption also varies greatly within the energy classes.
In class A +++, for example, a less efficient washing machine could use four times more electricity than the most economical appliance.
Even with fridge-freezer combinations, the power consumption in the same class sometimes fluctuates by 100 percent.
The device prices in the energy class A +++ are similarly diversified, according to the study.
Accordingly, they vary six to nine times.
In addition, your own usage behavior also plays a major role in how quickly you can recover the costs of an expensive new purchase.
For example, if you rarely dry your laundry electrically, you will hardly be able to recoup the additional costs for the more efficient device by saving electricity.
According to the research institute GfK, the useful life of the household appliances examined is an average of twelve years.
Verivox and Testberichte.de therefore advise you to only replace devices that are sure that you can save the purchase price during this time through lower consumption.
In the following tables you can research the average electricity costs of your household appliances - and of the appliances you might want to buy: