Abstract Energy efficiency of domestic refrigerators has markedly improved over recent years. Despite these improvements, low-income households in Australia still tend to own older and less energy-efficient refrigerators. Replacement of old refrigerators with energy-efficient appliances presents an important opportunity to reduce both greenhouse gas emissions and the electricity bills of households for sustainable development. This paper presents the measurement and verification of energy savings from a sample of 16 household refrigerator replacements under the Appliance Replacement Offer of the New South Wales Government, Australia. In-home monitoring and laboratory testing were conducted for both old and new refrigerators. A key challenge for this study was to estimate the energy savings of the replacement in each household based on limited in-home monitoring data. The annual energy savings from the refrigerator replacement in the households were estimated using the artificial neural networks (ANN) models for indoor air temperature prediction and the empirical models for the refrigerator energy consumption estimation. The experimental and estimation results both showed that most of the households achieved substantial energy savings from the replacement. The average annual energy cost savings and the average payback period of the refrigerator replacements were 53% and 4.3 years, respectively. It was also found that the energy savings could be compromised if the size of the new refrigerator was much larger than the old unit or if the efficiency of the old refrigerator was reasonably good.

中文翻译：

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低收入家庭的冰箱成本陷阱：电器更换测量和验证的发展

摘要 近年来，家用冰箱的能效有了显着提高。尽管有了这些改进，澳大利亚的低收入家庭仍然倾向于拥有旧的、节能的冰箱。用节能电器替代旧冰箱为减少温室气体排放和家庭电费以实现可持续发展提供了重要机会。本文介绍了根据澳大利亚新南威尔士州政府的电器更换提议，对 16 台家用冰箱更换样品的节能测量和验证。对新旧冰箱进行了家庭监控和实验室测试。这项研究的一个关键挑战是根据有限的家庭监测数据估计每个家庭更换后的能源节约情况。使用人工神经网络 (ANN) 模型进行室内空气温度预测和经验模型进行冰箱能耗估算，估算了家庭更换冰箱的年度节能效果。实验和估算结果均表明，大多数家庭通过更换实现了可观的节能效果。平均每年节约能源成本和更换冰箱的平均投资回收期分别为 53% 和 4.3 年。