In the US I suspect cheap and low quality appliances are source of a lot of wasted energy, which are the default in most new construction. My refrigerator runs ~75% of the time these days, despite my attempts to clean its exterior components. Its a pretty cheap model my home builder put in. I suspect it was intended to simply fail years ago and get replaced with typical family of 3-4 usage. But since I live by myself, my usage of it was not quite hard enough to trigger that failure. So it keeps on churning away, burning up the juice.