Trends in penetration and ownership of household appliances

Abstract

Since appliances consume a large fraction of the residential final energy consumption, analysing the impact and trends in penetration and ownership of appliances are targets of interest to researchers, companies and policy makers. However, there is a lack of published data based on the study of appliance penetration or ownership comparing different countries trends and assessing different appliances families. The data is usually found in percentages related to energy use or other factors, or in national directive documents written in local languages. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the trends in appliances penetration and/or ownership in the residential buildings sector providing access to the data of ten countries representing different world areas, and 20 appliances which fell into three distinct appliance categories (white goods, brown goods and small appliances), in a comparable framework. Penetration data is given for Australia, Austria, Denmark, France, Spain, UK, and USA; and ownership data for Australia, China, Hungary, Japan and USA.