There are a million ways to shop by price online. You can sort lowest to highest, seek sale items, look for free shipping, and head to sites like eBay to try to get a better deal. There’s also plenty of places that will tell you how eco-friendly a device is, or will be over its lifetime. Enervee is looking to combine those metrics into one website that gives you a price, features, and environmental impact breakdown on major household appliances, so you can see what the true price of an item will be over its lifetime and whether you need to feel guilty about the carbon footprint.
I pulled up an LG washer that’s very similar to the one we own, and it had a score of 67, which is deemed “Pretty good” by the site. They look at the carbon footprint (equivalent to two gallons of gas), they estimate it will cost approximately $400 over its lifetime to run, and then added in the purchase price to ballpark cost over 11 years. They seem to focus more heavily on energy, and I couldn’t find a metric that took into account water cost, but since this formula is being applied to dryers, refrigerators, dishwashers, and other household items, I can see why they focused on electricity as the biggest target. You can also see Amazon reviews on select items (television only for now but more will be rolled out), as well as multiple places to buy.
They’ve curated lists of affordable and environmentally friendly appliances from televisions to freezers, and I have to admit, it is a smart way to search. When we went shopping for a washer/dryer, our heads were spinning from all the options, and it was difficult to find a good roundup of several brands at a glance. Not to mention, everyone has some claim to “energy efficiency”, so the effective result is that no one brand stood out for its greenness. This is an effective way to group major brands, and the website is certainly easy to navigate. My two biggest complaints: the ad space on product pages is huge, killing much of the readable areas, and there’s no mobile site or app. It would be great to pull Enervee up in a store, but a site with huge ads and no mobile viewing option on a small screen is just painful.
Despite these complaints, I am bookmarking Enervee for future use. We need a good, solid chest freezer soon, and this will be a great way to narrow down our choices!