Sust-IT shows which tellies use least power

Ross Lammas is no ordinary man.

While building a new home and office in Gloucester, he became tired of how hard it was to find how much electricity appliances and electronics use. Instead of giving up in frustration, he built something else too: an energy comparison website.

Dubbed Sust-IT, the new site ranks everything from white goods (refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines) to entertainment gadgets (DVD players, set-top boxes, plasma tellies) on how much they cost to run. Now you might have expected the Energy Saving Trust - the official government-supported outfit - to offer this information already, but it doesn't feature league tables of the sort Sust-IT offers.

The best the EST offers is a list of 'energy efficient' manufacturers by product type. If you want to find out useful things like Kwh or what that translates to in cash, you have to look elsewhere.

Lammas's site, by comparison, surprisingly shows Beko and Candy fridge-freezers use 13p a day, beating Bosch's models on 14p, with SMEG not far behind. The myth that LCD TVs use more energy than conventional 'box' CRT ones is also demolished, with a very efficient Philips 32in LCD using 10p a day versus 11p a day for a Toshiba 32in CRT. The truth is that big TVs - those over 32 inches - use a lot of energy: LCD in itself isn't the problem.