The EU has a strategy for energy that envisages that by 2020 the EU will have a competitive energy market with security of supply and a reduced demand for that supply.  With targets that include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, increasing the share of renewable energy to 20% and making a 20% improvement in energy efficiency, the EU is proposing a legal obligation to establish energy saving schemes in all Member States.

In the UK, the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) requires the major domestic energy suppliers to demonstrate that their customers have achieved reductions in CO2 emissions. Currently 68% of their savings must come from professionally installed insulation measures.  The remainder can come from other options, hence the offers of loft insulation in DIY stores.

CERT is due to run until December 2012 after which the government’s proposed ‘Green Deal’ is intended to supersede it.  This scheme will allow householders and small businesses to borrow money for energy saving measures and pay back the loan via their energy bills, without them having to pay for anything in advance.

Later this year the government will publish a list of the measures that will be eligible, and AMDEA has argued that large domestic appliances would be an extremely cost-effective route to achieving easily measurable energy (and carbon) savings in the short term.  We also think that for many consumers facing rising energy bills, the proportion spent on appliances is becoming more significant and with more energy labels due to appear over the next few years, it will be easy to assess how much energy, and therefore money, consumers might save.

AMDEA has been promoting the benefits of trading in old appliances for several years now via our Time to Change campaign (www.t2c.org.uk).

The Time to Change campaign aims to provide consumers with information on the energy efficiency of modern domestic appliances and to involve politicians, government departments and other bodies in a debate on how to offer consumers incentives to replace their old appliances. 

The central feature of the website is a calculator to provide users with an estimate of their personal potential saving.  Keying in the age of their old appliance (the calculator provides results for every year of manufacture from 1980 to 2000) they can instantly calculate how much money, CO2, electricity (and water) they could save if they replaced their old appliance with a new A+ rated model. 

We conducted a case study in Cheltenham where we monitored a family’s 30 year old fridge-freezer for three weeks and then replaced it with a brand new A++ model which we monitored for a further three weeks.  The new appliances used approximately a fifth of the electricity consumed by the old model, representing savings of 4.3 KWh per week, 529kg of CO2 per year and enough money off the bill to cover the cost of the new fridge within three years.

This year we have a new version of the website, with information about more products and we are planning to feature on it several more case studies. The first will compare performance of a 20 year old fridge-freezer with that of an A+ model.

We will also be commissioning some academic research into the use of domestic appliances to provide more evidence of how much energy people use and also to look at consumer attitudes to different appliances.  We know that most households already view a washing machine, a fridge-freezer and a cooker as basic essentials and other appliances are being gradually added to this list. 

We have other plans for campaigning over the next few years but Time to Change was the first high-profile project that we launched and the message is still as relevant as ever.  The energy label allows consumers to see how much energy new appliances use – we just have to persuade them to check this for themselves.