Household appliances penetration and ownership trends in residential buildings

Abstract

Understanding the development of the trends in the ownership of different appliances in a historic context in various countries of the world can not only provide important insights for understanding the dynamics of adoption of different appliances, but can also help with foresight: how the future may develop for these or other, new appliances on the market. Although available literature in household appliances energy consumption, energy management and energy efficiency has seen some advances, there is a clear lack in the literature on household appliance ownership. In this paper, historic data is gathered and analysed for several groups of appliance types (white appliances, brown appliances and small appliances) for 12 countries representing four continents, when available since 1970 to date. Countries representing different parts of the world were selected to present an overview on household appliances ownership and energy consumption. One of the first conclusions of the study is that there is little or no information in many countries from South America, Africa or South Asia. Refrigerators, freezers and washing machines ownership are an example of most other white goods. Brown goods appeared in the market at very different time, depending on each one (from the 70s to the late 90s) and their ownership growth is much higher than for the previous ones. Most of small line appliances ownership has not reached saturation yet.

The work is partially funded by the Spanish government (ENE2015–64117-C5-1-R (MINECO/FEDER)). The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group GREA and DIOPMA (2014 SGR 123 and 2014 SGR 1543, respectively). GREA and DIOPMA are certified agents TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. Dr. Camila Barreneche would like to thank Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad de España for grant Juan de la Cierva, FJCI-2014–22886.