Six steps to choosing the best refrigerator

4. Going green

Diane Bondareff/AP Images for LG Electronics USA/File
In this September file photo, Chef Veronica Schwartz takes advantage of the capacity and freshness features of LG's super-capacity French-door refrigerator. The Energy Star-qualified fridge exceeds government energy standards by 20 percent.

Over the course of the past 20 years manufacturers have made tremendous gains in making home appliances more environmentally friendly and less costly to operate. As beneficial as these improvements are, over the course of its lifetime a refrigerator is still the most expensive kitchen appliance to maintain. In the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) created a classification called Energy Star. Although typically more expensive to purchase, appliances with the Energy Star logo can save almost half of the daily energy you use, cutting down overall costs in the long run. Energy Star refrigerators in particular consume around 40 percent less energy than their counterparts and can save you up to $150 annually. If you own your refrigerator for a decade, that’s up to $1,500 in savings. Check out this guide to EnergyStar Appliances for more information. 

4 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.