1930s Household Refrigerators (2013)
musingsonentropy.com
musingsonentropy.com
Functionally, it just needs a new door seal to go back into service. Unfortunately I turned it into another restoration project... the original glass drawers got smashed in the 70's, and replaced with pieces of wood paneling, the interior door panel is cracked, and most importantly, it needs all the wiring replaced.
Something of note for post-war appliances like this; due to copper shortages, a lot of manufacturers switched to aluminum wire. This, combined with the natural rubber insulation, and the lack of grounding, it's basically waiting to electrocute me, then set my house on fire.
A lot of other 40's and 50's appliances are probably the same in terms of aluminum wiring. Pretty much everything prior to the 70's is gonna be full of natural rubber insulation and no grounding (or double insulation), however.
http://web.archive.org/web/20121218033749/http://www.greenbu...
The ones with the highest consumption are the late 60s to 80s thin-walled ones (which makes for more interior space, but obviously less insulation) and those with defrost heaters.
It's both depressing and a bit amusing, both from the point of view of historical accuracy and saving working products from being scrapped, that a basic search on how much energy a fridge uses turns up misleading results like https://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/refrigerators.html --- that one cuts off at 1976, and is essentially claiming 2200kWh/year for all models before that year, which is a gross generalisation and exaggeration. 2200kWh/year is equivalent to consuming 250W for 24/7. The compressor in my fridge has a rated power of less than 100W, and certainly doesn't run 24/7.
I guess intuitively that makes sense since the first refrigerators were probably upgraded actual "ice boxes", where efficiency is obviously very important.
If you like to be prepared for worst case scenarios, get a friend to duct tape your hands together and lock you in the trunk of your car and see if you can escape. Make sure the friend sticks around to rescue you if you fail or cry out for help.
I have a feeling this is one of those cases where a small handful of cases got a disproportionate amount of media attention. It doesn't hurt to fix the problem, but it ends up being one of thousands of possible problems that people arbitrarily decided to fixate on.
Full of toxic plastic, insufficient insulation, energy wasting door construction, poor compressor and condenser placement, almost no thermal mass, highly toxic and expensive refrigerant gas, uneconomic to service generally. Basically, they’re cheap boxes of toxins designed to be discarded and replaced!
> toxic plastic
I'm not sure what this is referring to. You don't normally eat (or eat off of) the plastic components of a refrigerator. Maybe this is more an environmental concern than a health one?
> almost no thermal mass
Isn't this a desirable property of a highly-insulated box? Ideally, the most thermal mass should come from its contents, not the appliance itself.
> highly toxic and expensive refrigerant gas
R134a is the most common refrigerant used in residential refrigerators these days, which is not particularly toxic to humans. It's the primary ingredient in canned air dusters and no one seems to have a problem with that. 30lb tanks of this can be had for a little over $100, and a refrigerator would hold less than a pound of it. It does have a very high GWP though--an environmental concern, not a health one. (Side note -- I've also noticed propane (R-290) is becoming more common in commercial refrigerators.)
> energy hogging
To be fair, modern refrigerator compressors have become much more energy efficient than they used to be. Additionally, a variable speed compressor would have previously been unheard of in a residential appliance, but are now becoming relatively common in middle-to-high-end refrigerators.
> uneconomic to service generally
Well, this is hard to refute :) The problem is definitely broader than refrigerators, but residential appliances do seem particularly prone to it. One issue here is that refrigeration work in particular requires special equipment and expertise. From my experience, parts are often the least expensive aspect of repairing an appliance.
There are many refrigerants in active use, not just R134a. The positive trend in developed countries (particularly Europe) is towards R744 (high pressure CO2) for commercial use. However, most refrigerants are still a long way from clean, including R134a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane
The only refrigerants I'd consider "toxic" are things like SO2 and ammonia, both of which haven't been used in domestic machines for a long time (mine uses the original R114); and in fact the biggest selling point of CFCs and HFCs is that they're both nontoxic and nonflammable, while offering comparable efficiency. We might still be using CFCs today, if people hadn't been so cavalier with releasing them into the atmosphere.
Most modern fridges rely on controllers that are vulnerable to fail in high heat conditions, which are common given the awful placement of the coils and motors of fridges.
The pursuit of energy efficiency replaced easily serviced, long lasting gear with “efficient” junk with a MTBF of ~60 months. I have a garage fridge that my dad pulled out of the garbage 35 years ago.
Oh, man. So much this. The refrigerator that came with my house, a circa 2006 Samsung, has coils that grow ice. The (evaporator?) fan is positioned in such a way that the ice eventually grows into the fan blades. First it makes a super-annoying scraping sound, then the temperature in the fridge slowly creeps up to unsafe levels.
The fix only takes about an hour. You have to remove the back panel and defrost the coils with a hair dryer. I've done it a couple times now.
It boggles my mind that we can't have nicer appliances. I'd certainly be willing to pay more at this point in my life, but I have zero confidence I wouldn't just be paying more for the same trash.
I believe you. The point is this doesn't work very well. It's a pretty common complaint with the model.
> Are you by any chance in a high humidity location or running the fridge without adequate ventilation?
Eh, I have AC and a dehumidifier. The humidity is well under control inside my house.
As for ventilation, the refrigerator is in the only place you could possibly put a refrigerator in my kitchen. If it's not designed to work for that placement, then Samsung has no business being in the refrigerator business.
> You could possibly ask the service staff to adjust the thing to make it run more frequently, or request a replacement controller.
I am the service staff. I'm sure I could spend a good chunk of money on this. I'd rather not. I don't enjoy it, but manually defrosting the coils every eight months beats handing a couple hundy to a service person.
They rely on boards like you said, or thermistors that only close when cold to turn on the defrost coil.
Look up if your fridge has an actual manual defrost method(rather than your 'manual' defrost). Some of them are rather absurd. But if you're lucky enough to have one you can simply force extra defrosts when it's real hot/fridge being opened often instead of having to pull the shroud and manually do it.
First Test Method:
Turn the thermostat off for 15 seconds.
Turn the thermostat on for 5 seconds.
Turn the thermostat off for 15 seconds.
Turn the thermostat on for 5 seconds.
Turn the thermostat off for 15 seconds.
Turn the thermostat on for 5 seconds.
Turn the thermostat off.*My freezer drain would clog with ice, after a couple manual defrost cycles, I figured out the resistance heater that's supposed to keep the drain from freezing was just a little bit misaligned, a slight bend and it hasn't clogged since.
Not being the Hulk, I’m not regularly lifting a 300+ lb appliance and I doubt anyone else is. So every few years, it overheats in the summer.
It also shipped with a defective drain plug that would get blocked by a biofilm and cause the whole fridge to ice up. That was eventually recalled.
All of this is incompetence and engineering malpractice, committed by one of the largest and well respected appliance manufacturers. Their sole priority is engineered reliability to maximize revenue.
Regardless of how they are built they must meet government standards for energy efficiency which is expressed in the simplest terms for most people, as in kWh/Year and how much that will cost you per year to run. Seeing that some brands highlight their efficiency its pretty easy to shoot down his rant because that is all it is.
I've been noticing a lot of high-level comments that lambast the author or the content of the article. This doesn't seem very HN
(Leo Szillard conceived of chain nuclear reaction few years later and this friendship with Einstein allowed him to indirectly petition Roosevelt to start the Manhattan Project.)
aka "The two were motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes into their home"
Grandmother is in her 90's now.
We all thought that HFCs would save the world from the Ozone Hole, not realizing what a disaster they would turn out to be. Specify refrigeration equipment that uses ammonia or propane refrigerant.
Is this using the pound sign to represent an actual pound? First time I've ever seen that!
Who would have thought, government regulation literally can save lives.
Little is ever black or white. Some things are best implemented by gov, some by the marketplace.
point being, mandating backup cameras is an overreach of safety regulation, but not for seat belts.
[1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/2018/05/14/after-his-sons-tragic...
we don't regulate for the people (US, annually) who accidentally drown in a bathtub (~300) and get injured in a bathroom (~250k), even though it would address more harms (at a larger scale and possibly greater cost, depending on the mitigations).