A spare fridge or freezer is one of the quiet costs in a lot of homes. The drinks fridge in the garage, the chest freezer in the utility, the old fridge that got promoted to the shed when the kitchen was redone: each one runs day and night, all year, and none of them owes you anything. A second cold appliance typically adds somewhere between £40 and well over £120 a year to the bill, and the oldest, tattiest one is almost always the most expensive to keep going.
The short answer. A modern, efficient spare fridge might cost around £25 to £35 a year to run, and a modern chest freezer £40 to £60. An old one, fifteen years or more, can easily cost two to four times that, because fridge and freezer efficiency has improved enormously. The appliance you least want to pay for, the ancient spare in the garage, is usually the one quietly costing the most. Work out whether it earns its keep before you keep paying for it.
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The short version, and why it varies so much
How much a second fridge or freezer costs depends on four things: its age, its size, how efficient it is, and where you keep it. Age matters most. A fridge or freezer runs a compressor on and off around the clock to hold its temperature, and the energy that takes has fallen sharply over the years as insulation, compressors and controls have improved. A new appliance carries an energy label with a figure in kilowatt hours per year, and you turn that straight into money by multiplying by your unit rate. An old one has no useful label left and tends to use far more than a modern equivalent of the same size.
Because a fridge or freezer is one of the few things in the house that never switches off, it is a steady background draw rather than a spike. That makes it easy to forget and easy to underestimate. It is also why a small saving per day adds up: the thing runs 8,760 hours a year.
The old spare is the pricey one
The single most useful thing to know is that the old appliance is usually the expensive one. People keep a fifteen or twenty year old fridge running precisely because it still works, but still working and cheap to run are different things. An old larder fridge can get through two to four times the electricity of a new one of the same size, and an old freezer is often worse because the seals and insulation have aged.
The table shows illustrative figures at an example electricity rate of 26p per kWh, close to the Ofgem cap. The exact numbers depend on the model, but the gap between old and new is real and large.
| Appliance | Yearly use | Cost at 26p |
|---|---|---|
| Old larder fridge (~18 years) | ~450 kWh | ~£117 |
| Modern efficient fridge | ~100 kWh | ~£26 |
| Old chest freezer (~15 years) | ~550 kWh | ~£143 |
| Modern chest freezer | ~180 kWh | ~£47 |
Illustrative figures at an example 26p per kWh. Old appliances vary widely; a plug-in monitor gives your own exact figure.
On those example numbers, replacing an old spare fridge that costs £117 a year with a new one at £26 saves about £91 a year. A new under-counter fridge does not cost a fortune, so the payback on efficiency grounds alone can be only a few years, and that is before the old one finally dies and spoils a freezer full of food. The fridge and freezer efficiency guide goes into what to look for.
The garage problem in winter: your freezer might stop freezing
Here is the part that catches people out, and it is a genuine fault rather than a habit. Fridges and freezers are designed to work within a range of room temperatures, shown by a climate class letter on the rating plate. The common ones are SN (down to 10C), N (16C to 32C), ST and T (warmer climates). If the room drops below the appliance's minimum, it can misbehave.
The classic case is a fridge-freezer in an unheated garage in winter. When the garage falls to a few degrees, the fridge compartment's thermostat senses that it is already cold enough and stops the compressor running. The trouble is that the same compressor keeps the freezer section frozen, so the freezer slowly warms up and your food starts to thaw, in the middle of winter, in a freezing cold garage. A standalone freezer rated only to class N can have the same problem. If you must keep a freezer somewhere cold, look for one rated SN or, better, a model sold specifically as garage-safe, which is built to run in a cold space. It runs against intuition: a cold room can stop a freezer freezing.
The garage problem in summer: it costs most when it is hot
The other side of the year brings the opposite problem. A fridge or freezer works by moving heat out of the box and into the room around it, so the warmer that room, the harder the compressor has to work and the more electricity it uses. A garage, conservatory or sunny utility can sit well above living-room temperature on a hot day, which is exactly when the appliance costs the most to run and is most likely to struggle to hold temperature. The fridge and freezer in hot weather guide covers this in detail.
So a second appliance in an outbuilding tends to be in the worst place on both counts: too cold to run safely in winter and too hot to run cheaply in summer. A cool, stable indoor spot, a utility room or a cupboard away from the oven and off the sunny wall, is kinder to the running cost than a garage, even though the garage feels like the obvious place to banish a spare fridge to.
A worked example: the half-empty beer fridge
Take a common setup: a drinks fridge in the garage, picked up second hand, maybe twelve years old, half empty most of the time, holding a few cans and the overflow from Christmas. On a plug-in monitor an appliance like that might show around 1.1 kWh a day, which is about 400 kWh a year. At an example 26p per kWh that is roughly £104 a year, every year, to keep a handful of drinks cold.
Put that next to what it does. If it genuinely saves you trips to the shop or stops bulk-bought food going to waste, £104 might be money well spent. If it mostly holds a few cans you could chill in the main fridge in twenty minutes, it is £104 a year for a convenience you could do without. Nobody can make that call but you; the point is to make it with the real number in front of you rather than letting the fridge hum away unexamined. A plug-in energy monitor, covered in the using a plug-in energy monitor guide, gives you that number in a week.
When a second fridge or freezer earns its keep
A second fridge or freezer is not automatically waste. For plenty of homes it pays for itself.
A chest freezer earns its keep if you bulk buy, batch cook, grow your own veg, shoot or fish, or feed a large family, because the saving on cheaper bulk food and less waste can comfortably beat the running cost. A full freezer is also more efficient than an empty one, because the frozen contents hold the cold and the compressor runs less, so a freezer that is genuinely full and genuinely used is the good case. The chest freezer running cost guide has the detail for that appliance specifically.
The weak case is the half-empty spare kept running out of habit or just in case, the old fridge nobody got round to getting rid of, or a freezer with two bags of peas in it. Those cost the same to run as a full one but do almost nothing for you. Keeping a large freezer barely used is the clearest waste of the lot.
Cutting the running cost if you are keeping it
If you have decided a second appliance is worth keeping, a few things trim what it costs.
Get rid of the old one. If the spare is ancient, replacing it with an efficient model, or simply retiring it and consolidating into one good fridge-freezer, is the biggest single saving. Keep it full, especially a freezer, so the contents hold the cold. Check the door seals: a seal that no longer grips lets cold leak out and the compressor run more, and a note of paper shut in the door will tell you if the grip has gone when you try to pull it out. Set a sensible temperature rather than the coldest setting, around 3C to 5C for a fridge and minus 18C for a freezer, as the fridge temperature settings guide explains. Defrost a manual freezer when the ice builds up, because a thick layer of frost makes it work harder. Keep it out of direct sun and away from the oven or boiler. And site it somewhere within its climate class, not a freezing garage. None of these is dramatic on its own, but together they keep a necessary appliance from costing more than it needs to.
Working out your own figure
The honest way to know what your second fridge or freezer costs is to measure it, because age and condition make the published figures only a guide. Plug it into a cheap energy monitor for a week, note the kWh used, multiply by about 52 for the year and by your unit rate, and you have the real annual cost in pounds. That one number tells you whether the appliance is a sensible convenience or an expensive habit. A cold appliance that never switches off is exactly the sort of steady background load that the what uses the most electricity guide flags as worth checking, and the appliance running cost calculator will turn your measured kWh into money.
Common questions
How much does a second fridge cost to run?
A modern, efficient spare fridge costs roughly £25 to £35 a year at around 26p per kWh, and a modern chest freezer about £40 to £60. An old appliance of fifteen years or more can cost two to four times as much, so a spare fridge in a garage can easily run to £100 a year or more.
Why is my old fridge so expensive to run?
Fridge and freezer efficiency has improved a great deal over the years through better insulation, compressors and controls. An old larder fridge can use two to four times the electricity of a new one the same size, and worn door seals and tired insulation make it worse, so the old spare is usually the costliest appliance to keep going.
Can I keep a freezer in the garage?
Only if it is rated for the temperature. Check the climate class on the rating plate: a freezer rated only to class N (16C and up) can fail in a cold garage, because the thermostat senses the cold room, stops the compressor and lets the freezer thaw. Look for a model rated SN or sold as garage-safe, and remember a hot garage in summer pushes the running cost up.
Is a second freezer worth it?
It is worth it if you genuinely use it: bulk buying, batch cooking, home-grown veg or a large family can save more on food and waste than the freezer costs to run, and a full freezer is more efficient than an empty one. A half-empty freezer kept just in case costs the same to run but does almost nothing, so measure it with a plug-in monitor and decide on the real number.