Buy Efficient, Be Efficient

Sokitt aims to make price, energy and water efficiency information easily available in one place to everyone in the hope that, if everyone can compare these things easily, the great Aussie consumer will vote with their wallets and stop buying expensive, inefficient appliances. This will mean that retailers will stop stocking them and manufacturers will stop making them.

That's the theory anyway. Let's see what happens!

How does it work?

From the homepage, select the appliance type you are looking for, then press the big red button.

Once you see the big grid with all the appliances, refine your search with the options up top. For example - you may only want a side-by-side fridge bigger than 300 litres.

If you want to find the cheapest appliance of a certain star rating then go to the top right drop-down box, choose, "sort by energy rating" and you will get a list of appliances sorted by energy rating and then by price, so for example the cheapest 4 star fridge will be at the top of all the four star fridges.

Using sokitt to work out if you should upgrade your old appliances

The astute amongst you may have noticed the link underneath the main selection tool on the homepage:

This link will let you look up energy consumption figures for old appliances and compare them with a brand spanking new one.

It will even work out how long it will take for your savings in energy and water bills to pay for your new appliances.

Please let us know how you get on searching for better dishwashers, clothes washers fridges and dryers, and please be aware that not all the appliances are on there yet as some of the more obscure brands don't publish their prices online yet (but we are working on them!)

Where does the data come from?

The energy rating data is from those nice people at energyrating.gov.au.

The water rating data is scraped from waterrating.gov.au.

Prices are scraped from appliancesonline.com.au

Whodunnit?

sokitt was put together by eco-hacker Finn Peacock after wasting an entire Saturday trying to find the most water and energy efficient dishwasher under $1000.

Finn is an electrical engineer by training and has worked in Nuclear Power Stations, Engineering Consulting, Mines, Manufacturing, and most recently for the CSIRO's Energy Transformed Flagship.

If you love, hate or want a sokitt in your country contact Finn here.