Appliances and energy consumption

Summary: Appliances are goods or devices that perform or facilitate certain tasks of daily living, and they consume different forms of energy, from human to electric power. Today’s appliances are used both at home or in the workplace and consume mostly electricity or gas.

Seen as a clean and more efficient form of energy, electricity replaced other fuels, such as coal and gas, to operate appliances at a great speed during the 20th century. One of the first widely spread electric appliances in Western countries was the telephone. Even though the first electric appliances for heating, cooking, and cooling had become available in the late 19th century, it was only at the beginning of the 20th century that domestic devices powered by gas or electricity—especially irons and cooking appliances—became commonplace. Electric irons were especially cheap, did not require complicated installation, and replaced the dirty and exhausting process of ironing with heavy irons heated over coal fires.

The invention of the versatile electric motor leveraged domestic electricity usage. In the course of the 20th century, washing machines, kitchen machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, air conditioners, and many other devices today taken for granted were introduced on a mass scale to private households as labor- and time-saving helpers. Radio sets became the first mass-produced consumer electronics good in the 1920s. After World War II, television sets also quickly gained currency. Difficult to afford, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, most major appliances were reserved for high-income groups until the 1940s in North America and even as late as the 1960s in Western Europe.

Since the 1970s electric appliances for data-processing and communications, from fax machines to computers, have become fixtures in both offices and households and have influenced domestic energy consumption, but appliances for heating and cooling rooms, water, and food are still the major energy-consuming devices. The least energy in households is consumed by appliances for home improvement and needlework, such as sewing machines and drills, which are used periodically or infrequently rather than on a daily basis.

With industrialization during the late 18th and 19th centuries, the modern urban household came into being as a place that was separated from the sphere of production and labor. Connected with child rearing and domestic consumption, it was defined as the feminine workplace. At the same time, the construction of urban infrastructure laid the foundation for widespread domestic mechanization. At the end of the 19th century, an increasing number of private households were connected to electricity or a gas supply; the latter was the first energy source used for lighting in modern households. Because utility companies aimed at increasing energy sales, they promoted the usage of other domestic appliances beyond lights.

Energy providers, appliances’ manufacturers, and housewives’ associations promoted appliances designed to ease women’s workload. In fact, the introduction of household appliances affected the daily routines of housewives to a great extent but did not lead automatically to a reduction of the workload. Electricity- and gas-powered appliances facilitated work but were used more often than their manually operated forerunners, which resulted in rapidly increasing energy consumption.

Along with the introduction of domestic appliances—“white” as well as “brown goods”—common standards of convenience and comfort increased. Household appliances became not only indispensable assistants in daily life but also even easier to use. To understand the interaction of domestic appliances and changing energy consumption patterns, a notion of appliances that goes beyond their functions is useful. As consumer goods, they create and mediate cultural values. Thus, sociological studies have shown that the adoption of appliances influences consumption patterns and norms. For example, ideas of cleanliness influence how often clothes have to be washed and therefore the amount of kilowatt-hours and water consumed. Although washing machines became more energy efficient, their increased use caused an “energy rebound effect.”

Science and technology studies (STS) emphasize that the success or failure of an appliance as a consumer good is the result of a complex process of negotiation between the technology and producers’ expectations regarding users. Ruth Schwartz Cowan introduced the notion of the consumption junction to describe the position of the potential or actual consumer located in a network of social relations that influence and control consumers’ choices. At this point, diverging economic interests, technical constraints, and consumer requirements are negotiated. Cowan’s paradigm has cast light on the influence of appliances on consumption patterns, on one hand, and the “coconstruction” of appliances by society and culture, on the other—as they affect energy consumption and costs, for example. However, purchase decisions do not solely depend on the efficiency of an appliance or its cost. Madeleine Akrich points out that cultural values and expectations of consumers’ behavior are ascribed to appliances. Consumers read these “codes” and reproduce them or resist them by redefining an appliance in a way different from that the inventor or producer intended. In this sense, the production of energy-efficient appliances does not necessarily ensure their efficient handling by users.

Appliances and

High and continuously rising private energy consumption has been a topic of public debate since the influential book produced by the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972), as well as the oil price crises of the 1970s. Producers of electricity as well as household appliances constructed and promoted water-saving and energy-efficient appliances by the help of microelectronics, not least because they had to assert themselves in a saturated market. Despite growing efficiency, private energy consumption did not decrease. Frequently mentioned reasons for this development are the individualization of Western societies and the diversification of household equipment, as well as its more intensive usage.

Besides, it has to be taken into account that the production of appliances requires a high amount of energy. Moreover, another environmental problem is their electronic waste. Because of fast-changing trends, many appliances—notably consumer electronics—are replaced frequently and are therefore the focus of recycling and consumer awareness efforts. Energy labeling is an important measure to make the energy consumed by a particular domestic appliance visible for consumers. In the United States, major appliances have to meet statutory provisions, the fulfillment of which is labeled with the Energy Guide label; even stricter energy efficiency criteria have to be fulfilled to be labeled with the Energy Star seal. In the European Union, most white goods, cars, and lightbulbs have a uniform label displayed, which shows the energy efficiency class of the product, A++ being the most energy efficient and G the least.

To control domestic energy consumption, smart meters have started to replace conventional meters in some Western households. They automatically record the amount of electricity, gas, water, or heat used by the household, as well as the time of use, and communicate these data to the utility suppliers. Smart meters can improve the coordination of consumption and production to adjust prices and improve the utilization of (thermal) power plants and water utilities. In most countries, smart metering has not been introduced yet or is still in a testing phase, although it has been introduced in many communities throughout the United States. Some US appliances also use a smart grid. This is a network that uses technology to track and monitor the amount of electricity used and consumed by consumers and producers. Millions of smart meters that use a smart grid have been installed in appliances sold in the United States.

Bibliography

Akrich, Madeleine. “The Description of Technical Objects.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

"Appliance and Equipment Standards Program." Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/appliance-and-equipment-standards-program. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Herring, Horace, and Steve Sorrell, eds. Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Consumption. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Parr, Joy. Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Shove, Elizabeth. Comfort, Cleanliness, and Convenience. The Social Organization of Normality. Oxford: Berg, 2003.