Many consumers today purchase home appliances based on one primary factor – purchase price. While features and energy efficiency are important, they certainly don't take top billing when it comes to paying at the cash register. The Enervee Marketplace, a web site that utilities can use to allow consumers to research appliance purchases, attempts to educate consumers so they know the cost of the appliance over its life span, including energy.

Enervee and Opower, a software company that works with utilities, have developed the Marketplace as the go-to web site for researching major home appliance purchases. Marketplace aggregates information including purchase price, rebates and other incentives, as well as the Enervee Score – Enervee's daily-fresh energy efficiency product ranking. Utilities can use Enervee's Marketplace web site to offer their consumers up-to-the-day efficiency information on major appliances.

Matthias Kurwig, Founder and CEO, Enervee, says, "This is a great opportunity for Enervee to rapidly roll-out a compelling buying experience for millions of energy customers across the US and potentially beyond through Opower's industry-leading software platform. By enabling consumers to take action on Opower's insights and recommendations it not only drives consumer interest and loyalty for utilities, but also ensures considerable energy savings are baked in and recorded at the moment of purchase."

The Enervee Score rates home appliance energy efficiency based on daily updates.

Research shows that buying energy efficient products is not only one of the most effective ways to reduce energy costs, but it is also one of the most achievable outcomes even with consumers who ordinarily choose to opt out of energy saving programs.

There are many reasons for consumers to purchase energy efficient appliances:

It is the one-time behavior that delivers savings year after year. Energy savings are captured every year if you buy an energy efficient product or appliance, for the simple fact that it remains more efficient than the average product in its category for years. So with no changes in consumer usage behavior, there are savings that keep on stacking up.

Even non-energy conscious consumers see the value in buying energy efficient. Short of refitting your entire home, buying energy efficient products is not only the most effective way to save energy but it is also one of the most effective ways to engage consumers who ordinarily opt out of energy initiatives. It's an effective route to those hard to engage consumers (Dietz et al, 2009).

Doing the right thing means buying the right thing. Consumers are becoming far more interested in making commitments to the 'right' purchase decisions – 65% of consumers consider the importance of doing the right thing when buying products (GlobeScan, 2013).

Finally, an energy efficiency rating that is always up to date. Energy efficiency certification can be up to a couple of years old for certain products – meaning consumers are making decisions on stale data. The Enervee Score (1-100) is updated daily. That's a level of timeliness and accuracy the market has never seen before.

The win-win of talking about losses. Enervee research shows consumers respond far more to messages about how much money they will lose by making a bad choice, than to how much money they may save with a good choice. That's 'loss aversion' (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) applied to appliances, and it shows talking about losses gets the right result for the consumer and for the environment.

Turn on. Tune in. Save Big. In Northern California alone, 1.35 million TVs will be sold during this holiday shopping season. If every person buying a new TV during this time committed to buy an efficient TV with an Enervee Score of 75+, then the energy savings would be the equivalent of taking 33,634 houses off the grid.

Source and Photo: Enervee, Casey Fleser through a Creative Commons License