All the boxes look the same, but they are all different.
A comprehensive guide to buying your next refrigerator
After looking at long lines of refrigerators in a mall, or browsing through hundreds of models on an e-commerce website, they all tend to merge and become grey boxes that cool stuff kept inside. It can become a mind-numbing task to go through all the available models and choose the perfect one for your household and your energy needs.
This article serves as a small guide to help and educate you about the various aspects of a refrigerator and how they affect its energy and efficiency of the same.
Around 70 samples were taken from Amazon.com to create a small database of refrigerators under 30k. The graph below shows the cost distribution across brands.
Adding a layer of capacity to the above chart to provide information about the variety of refrigerators provided by each company in the price range.
Direct Cool or Frost-free Cooling tech
Frost-free refrigerators do not require any manual de-icing or defrosting. It is handled automatically. Direct cool refrigerators can keep your food cool and fresh for a longer duration in case of a power outage.
Energy Star Rating
Every refrigerator comes with Energy Efficiency Ratings (EER) that are standardized by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE). The more the number of stars for a fridge, the higher the energy efficiency it has. A 5 Star fridge will consume approximately 10-15% less power than a 3 Star fridge for a similar run.
The graph below shows the distribution of refrigerators across costs grouped by their energy ratings. The size of the point represents the number of doors.
Feature set
There are some additional features that you can look for if making a choice between similar capacities and other aspects of a few refrigerators are same. Some of these key features can be:
Conclusion
The budget category of refrigerators under 30K is saturated with models with very similar core attributes. The slight variation between the efficiency and Annual power consumption is something a user can look into while trying to decide upon which model to select for themselves. Further upon the same, they can also handpick the features that are important to them, to help them with the decision.
