[trwired]

Which is fine by me. I need a fridge to cool things down, oven to heat them up and TV to show moving pictures, all without access to wifi and other bells and whistles modern appliances come with. Just the basic stuff that those appliances could handle 20 years ago. More doesn't always translate to better.

[maccard]

20 years ago with fridges is a bit of a funny one because by then most had gotten rid of the nasty CFC's. But, even at that, it looks like today's fridges are _orders of magnitude_ more efficient to run than those from about 15-20 years ago.

For an oven and hob, the basics haven't changed, but my previous flat had a $600 oven that was silent, leaked practically no heat, preheated in a couple of minutes and came with nest features like an auto switch off. My new home has a range from about 15 years ago that cost 3x that, takes 20 minutes to preheat, has massive cool spots in the oven, and is noisier than my dishwasher.

For TV's, 20 years ago we were using CRT's to drive 480 vertical lines for the most part. Nowadays, you can get a 1080p HDR led TV for $200 that used 1/3 of the power of the CRT.

[dublin]

Utter Bullshit! Today's refrigerators are no more efficient than those from decades ago. In fact, the older, banned refrigerants are often more efficient, since their refrigerants were optimally designed and selected for maximum performance/efficiency in the first place! (And engineers were much better then, too. Really. Plus, I assure you that Thermodynamics has not changed in the interim!)

I'm sure my 35 y.o. Freon refrigerator is pretty much identically efficient to a modern one. The biggest difference is that mine is still running beautifully halfway through its 4th decade, while all the latest Chinese-sht-tech refrigerators will be unfixably dead in about five years at the outside. People should consider that* environmental and efficiency advantage!

[sokoloff]

> it looks like today's fridges are _orders of magnitude_ more efficient to run than those from about 15-20 years ago

15-20 year old fridges are about 35% less energy efficient than the best modern fridges, not 100x. We just haven't made that much progress in refrigerants, compressors, nor insulation.

It looks like very efficient fridges today use about 400kWh per year. Those are the best (not the average).

In the late 90s, the overall average (not best) figure was ~850 kWh/yr and from the early 2000s (20 years ago), it was ~550kWh/yr.

A 15-20 year old average fridge is about 35% less energy efficient (550/400 - 1) than the best modern fridges.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> TV to show moving pictures, all without access to wifi

You watch network TV ??? In 2023 ???

[Arrath]

While I appreciate that joke (and likewise can't stand the ad loading of modern tv), OP may well use a stream box like a chromecast, roku, or firestick, or even a game console to do their watching through a plain dumb tv.