Low Energy Chest Fridge
notechmagazine.com
notechmagazine.com
Except it's neither of those things and why the normal side opening fridge is the prevalent kind despite its poor power efficiency.
It occupies double the floor area for half the storage, and you have to take everything out to access the bottom most shelves. Even on boats where power efficiency is critical, I've seen people go for the side opening type if they possibly can, because it's just that much more practical.
And an ice pick, if you live anywhere even slightly humid.
The main reason people forget stuff in the freezer is because it's used as a freezer, for long-term storage. The shape isn't the biggest part of that problem. If you use this as a fridge you won't have the same issues.
edit: having said that, the accumulation of condensed water at the bottom that some other commenters mentions seems like a real problem that needs a dedicated solution.
The only issue is having to run outside in my tighty whities in the middle of the night if I run out of milk in the main fridge.
I can't find one right now but basically you push down and unlatch and then it has a spring that helps it raise, and to lower you just push down a bit harder.
Something like this would be hilarious but probably work fine: https://www.amazon.com/Electric-Hydraulic-110V-240V-Platform...
If the freezer compartment were above the fridge I'd assume it could mostly rely on gravity.
There is also sometimes a stepper-motor controlled baffle to open/close the link between the two - closed when the freezer is cooling - it usually opens around -18C when freezer temperature is heading lower.
That baffle will also close in frost-free freezers whilst the heater element is melting the ice on the evaporator - it usually reaches +20C and happens several times a week.
Much could be saved by using remote compressors but that cost is much higher and usually associated with commercial units.
Maybe one day we’ll have a refrigerant network in a home that refrigeration could tap into, but the cost of specialization will probably exceed the savings :(
Or maybe run a municipal water loop into the fridge? Many are almost there when they have an ice machine (which is also horrible for efficiency).
In winter, you don’t want to bring in very cold stuff from outside the big box into a smaller box inside the big box: the net effect is you’re making the overall big box colder.
Heat pumps are very efficient!
Though your argument holds up if electricity is expensive and heat is cheap (e.g. off grid with woodstove heat)
If anything, you want to bring stuff from outside the big box, put it in the little box to chill further (dumping the heat inside your big box), and then toss out the super chilled stuff from the little box out of the big box.
All in all it's too complicated to work out, but I will admit to leaving frozen goods in the trunk in the winter because of laziness.
But nooooooooooooo, bring the warmish frozen stuff into the little box inside the big box in winter ASAP. (Unless, like I said, you're offgrid with unlimited trees)
Source: https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI
It's less energy efficient. It's significantly more time efficient and ergonomic.
For convenience items some boaters are using drawer refrigerators but unlike residential units, the drawers are like bowls keeping the cold air from falling out.
Sure, you lose cold air when you open the fridge, but the warm air is almost instantly recooled after closing.
Even full size residential fridges can be powered by the smallest portable generator.
Huh? I have a van with a side-opening "mini-fridge" (about half the height of a normal residential fridge) running on 12 VDC, and with 200 W of solar (shared between all the possible uses) the fridge will never run out of power.
I would bet that most people that are doing this conversion (and there are many, this idea has been around for years [0]) are already doing weird stuff for off-grid living, so turning a freezer into a fridge isn't a big deal - the inconveniences are just different.
The article does not mention that a thermostat coupled to a mechanical switch [1] is typically used to regulate the temperature.
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=freezer+fridge+conversion
If you were not blessed with sliding shelves, people typically uses bins or dividers
In practice you keep “the gap” over the part of the floor with the greatest cooling capacity and put your quick turnover “inserted warm” items on the bottom layer there. They cool fastest and are easy to get to.
That's kinda what big door shelves are accomplishing in upright fridges, of course, and I have no idea how robust a riser mechanism would be over time, so I'm not sure how much better that is.
I challenge you to do better.
How about:
- shelves that raise vertically - shelves that swing up and out to the sides or front (bet gas shocks could work for easily moving shelves) - preplanning so that your meal ingredients for the week are on top
As with many things, you can change your surroundings or change your behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift
That way it all stays in the chest
Newer ones will have a jerry-rigged hook-and-eye latch or some variation screwed inappropriately into the brightwork. Brand new ones will have nothing, and then they will have a jerry-rigged bungee cord wrapped awkwardly around it about 12 minutes after leaving the dock.
Sailors will be still on the pier arguing with the harbormaster, "what do you mean you stopped selling block ice?"
1. Make the top of chest-style refrigerators an integrated piece of a countertop. That way, when the door is closed, it essentially takes no additional space. That is, you are essentially swapping space: the vertical area that most kitchens reserve for a fridge can be used for cabinet storage, and the under-countertop area can now be used for cold food storage. Many kitchens have islands, and using that island for cold food storage would be ideal.
2. You could mechanize shelves so that they slide up vertically for easy access (think of a pez dispenser).
Submitters, can you please link to the original source if the one you link to adds no value?
According to a test report by Stiftung Warentest (the German equivalent to Consumer Reports), my vertical fridge consumes ~ 0.4-0.5 kWh / day. While that is more, it's nowhere close to the 10x-20x given by this guy.
This made me think. I would kind of expect the energy consumption of a fridge to be related to the surface area of the cooled volume rather than the volume itself. It's not necessary to spend any energy cooling air that is already surrounded by equally cold air.
Assuming all fridges are cubes, doubling the volume of the fridge will increase the surface area by a factor of 2^{2/3} = 59%. This will also be true if the fridge has any rectangular dimensions and you double the volume by scaling it up evenly in all three dimensions.
Things are more complicated if you scale the dimensions of the fridge unevenly.
I'd expect that for a fridge that's permanently closed, but what if you open it regularly? I'd expect a lot of the cold air inside (so volume) to mix with the room-temperature air once you open it..?
Then there's variability depending on thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of various foods. So what you're trying to calculate is heavily dependent on the actual contents, not just surface area.
Of course, fridges have cycling behavior similar to an AC that turns on as soon as temp dips below a set temp, but has a window of sorts. Making the above math even more complicated.
This assumes that the dominant energy expenditure of the fridge is bringing new food down to fridge temperature.
But almost all of the contents of a fridge have been in there for a while and are already at fridge temperature. Most of what the fridge is doing is maintaining the internal temperature against the outside environmental temperature.
You don’t have to assume any shape for this, as long as the shape remains the same, and that it is not fractal. You could have a spherical fridge and it would still be true.
Why assume that the old fridge will be geometrically proportional to the new fridge? I think that's particularly unlikely to be true in the case of a person replacing their existing refrigerator.
They are. Unless you reach the scale of the walk-in fridge, you don’t want a fridge to be deeper than an arm’s length, and even small fridges have that depth because they’re designed to fit a kitchen top, which also is scaled for an arm’s length.
Vertical scaling is a bit more flexible, but will stop at about 2 meters (until you reach sizes that you can drive a forklift in)
On the plus side, if you scale things evenly, wall thickness also goes up, so heat losses per m² of area will go down.
I don't like the idea of American fridges, they waste lot of space on the separator middle wall, I think the best compromise who is not fine with regular fridge are now a bit wider fridges but with single vertical door.
My Chinese in-laws have vertical fridge which has 3 sections, top regular door fridge, middle drawer which goes directly outside (not sure whether it's chilled or frozen), no need to open anything and bottom freezer with door.
This was probably true up until the 90s. At that point side by sides became pretty popular with the left side being a freezer and the right side being a fridge, full height. See:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/ge-25-1-cu-ft-side-by-side-refr...
After these broke the trend of the top freezer, other styles became more popular. These days one of the most popular style is the "french door" where there are two side by side doors for the fridge compartment up top with a drawer below for the freezer.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-26-5-cu-ft-french-door-count...
Top freezer fridges these days are often seen as a very outdated and out of fashion style of fridge usually only relegated to the bottom tier models of fridges. If you go into most appliance stores you'll see row after row of french door, several side by sides, and then a couple of super basic top freezers.
Personally, IDGAF about "style" for a fridge when it comes to door arrangements. I like my side by side the most as then I have both fridge and freezer items as convenient heights instead of only really having a freezer at eye level and having to duck down to grab anything in the fridge.
We have these in the US.
We also have some with a door-on-a-door for the fridge portion, so you can grab e.g. a can of soda or some mustard out of the inset door which only accesses a little storage on the door itself, without opening the entire fridge.
Neither is as common as other styles (the latter especially—that's kind of a gimmicky expensive-fridge feature) but they exist.
If you have an empty fridge or freezer, it's a good practice to put e.g. water bottles in there for cool thermal mass, ideally in the top (cold air flows downwards; old fashion fridges were cabinets with a compartiment in the top for blocks of ice they would store underground in winter).
A modern house conditions the air inside to a certain temperature (often heating it up) and then has a box inside that is conditioning the air (often cooling it back down to outside temperature).
At its core a refrigerator is a big insulated box with a heat pump and a heater. Manufacturers have optimized the living daylights out of these things. Big manufacturers (LG, Whirlpool, GE) have tried at various points to roll out more and more efficient compressors going back to the 80s. And they've all had a horrible time of it. There's not as much room for optimization with the heater, but most manufacturers have moved towards electronically controlled heaters that can run on demand instead of on a timer – works well until a thermistor fails. Samsung also tried to "optimize" the defrost heater by shrinking it (my impression is LG is that just as guilty of this) and you'll find plenty of complaints about problems with the evaporators icing up.
Anyhow, out here, at least, smaller fridge/freezers including chest freezers are so-called manual defrost units and do not have a power hungry heater. If I had to guess I'd say the big difference consumption is due more towards running a giant heater in the back (a.k.a. auto defrost) than the overall size.
According to the government site responsible for energy ratings - energyrating.gov.au, ‘Refrigerators and freezers have been required to display an energy label since 1986 and to meet minimum energy efficiency levels since 1999. As a result, refrigerators and freezers are now 70 per cent more efficient than they were 30 years ago’.
New technology also mean that internal sensors inside the fridge can regulate the temperature so that the fridge is always running efficiently. Other innovations include temperature warnings and electronic temperature controls, humidity controlled compartments, and different temperature zones within the fridge according to the food to be stored. There are also ‘vacation’ settings which lowers energy consumption for the duration of your trip - you just need to remember to switch the setting off when you get home.
Today every new fridge carries a red-star energy-rating sticker, giving it an efficiency rating and telling you how many kilowatts (kW) of electricity it uses in a year, given average usage. While energy-efficient fridges might cost more they can save tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and hundreds of dollars over their lifetime through lower energy use. For instance, a 400 litre family fridge with a maximum six-star energy rating can use as little as 250 kW per year and cost you about $40 a year to run. A less efficient 500 litre model, on the other hand, could use 650kW a year and cost you more than $100 a year to run. That's a saving of $60 a year or $600 over ten years. And with electricity prices set to rise substantially in coming years, savings are likely to be even greater.
https://hipages.com.au/article/energy_efficient_fridges_and_...
Stateside the yellow "EnergyGuide" stickers were required by federal law beginning in 1980. These cover things like water heaters, fridges, dishwashers, and air conditioners.
FWIW my one fridge is around 538 liters (~19 cubic feet) and is rated at 420 kWh/year ($50/yr at $0.12/kWh). Of course I'm not sure how the testing methodology compares to that of Oz.
It’s an insulated box, like a battery, but they don’t take advantage of time of day electricity rates when they’re perfectly suited to that.
Would be unfortunate for ice cream; but for everything else in my freezer, send it to 0 Kelvin.
To be fair, prices come in kWh, so it makes sense in order to ask "how much do I spend in a day"
It’s great, it costs very little to run.
But it’s a beast to organize.
For a while we had piles of loose frozen things, which eventually got all mixed up, so we had no idea what was hiding in there.
Now I have some plastic crates stacked inside - but the bottom level is a mystery bc nobody’s ever wants to lift out a 20lb crate to see what lies beneath.
Then, when (not if) we lose power for a while, we duct tape the lid to the freezers closed. Once power comes back on, we check the quarter. It's a pretty good indicator of what we should get rid of, based on how far in the container the quarter has sunk and re-frozen.
I know spoilage is a spectrum (10C is still much better than 20C), but also wondered how much or little passive cooling there is.
Pi, camera, small screen, and some image recognition ?
To para-phrase a famous BBC journalist embedded on a U.K. aircraft carrier during the Falklands war and restricted on what he was allowed to say:
"... I counted them all out, and I counted them all back." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Hanrahan#Falklands_War
Over kill probably, but my wife is short so it pays dividends.
The ice blocks push all the food up to the top of the chest freezer, and it helps remind us not to overfill it.
The freezer section has doors for more effective temperature control.
0: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/austin-texas-circa-...
Like on this picture: https://www.grocerygazette.co.uk/2021/11/09/supermarket-frid...
Nonsense. Europe is a big place and making sweeping generalizations is not meaningful.
If home refrigerators did the same, it would reduce your electric bill quite a lot, especially in places where A/C is used.
Still losses to have to cool down to 5 Celsius instead of 20 Celsius though, makes the heat pump a lot less energy efficient.
I'm so irritated by this phenomenon I'll unlock those doors to close them.
I am talking about fridges for milk, cheese, etc... that are round 5C. I don't remember seeing vertical, doorless sub-zero freezers. In fact nowadays, even the horizontal freezers usually have doors.
You still see some small doorless fridges with high margin quick grab products but you no longer need to wear a coat when you go near the fresh or frozen department.
Lower and more precise temperatures reduces food waste, which indirectly reduces both costs and energy use.
(While I assume that some of those are opened quite often, where shutting doors might push a lot of warm air back in, while keeping them open with less air movement might even be more efficient)
(Somewhat joking. I’m sure chilled milk is a thing, but I think shelf-stable UHT has like 95% of the market)
Personally, I use both. I usually buy a bottle or two of fresh milk when I go shopping, and I keep a pack of UHT in case I don't have enough fresh milk. This way, I will not run out of milk, and I will not let my fresh milk spoil because I bought too much.
And yes, fresh milk (whole and half-skimmed) can be found in almost any supermarket. AFAIK skimmed milk is almost exclusively UHT, and raw milk is very hard to find but not illegal.
Though some supermarkets in the UK seem to have a simple "solution" to this problem: turn the AC inside the building to a maximum. Last summer, it was 32°C outside, and a chilling 15°C inside.
Doorless fridges aren't a problem if you consider the whole shop as the fridge. /s
Which implies that the expense of fridgeless systems must be worth eliminating, as Aldi are laser focused on cost.
Whether having the heat rejecting coils indoors or outdoors is most energy efficient depends on the local climate. It is a very straightforward calculation based on building heating and cooling requirements over a given year and doing such calculation (really more of consulting a table of pre-crunched numbers) is SOP in commercial refrigeration.
I assure you nobody with a commercial refrigeration need is pissing away thousands of dollars a year in energy by choosing the non-optimal equipment for their situation. Basically there is already a big "tax" on "doing it wrong".
The only problem we have is humidity. With everyday use, a lot of condensed water gets stuck inside, the humidity goes near 100 % and the moulds really like that.
We tried many things, including making a drain hole inside, but nothing helped. We "solved" it with putting 1 kg of adsorbent (silica gel) on the bottom. It lasts about two months between regenerations, so it is quite usable this way.
Don't chest fridges have a similar mechanism? Perhaps the problem is things being too closely-packed, so the air can't circulate - so that when the lid is opened and water vapour let in from outside, it condenses on the food etc - but this isn't then removed by the mechanism above.
It was designed as a freezer, not a fridge, after all.
https://www.amazon.com/Improved-Eva-dry-333-Renewable-Dehumi...
https://evadry.wpengine.com/product/e-500-renewable-high-cap...
But the winter is coming now, so the extra heat generated when regenerating won't go to waste.
Now THIS is a great idea! I have the same thing (converted old freezer to chest fridge with custom IoT temperature-controlled plug switch magic; though I now replaced it with a chest freezer that was actually designed with a thermostat allowing temperatures over 0 degrees celsius) and the same exact problem with the moisture accumulating at the bottom. The device actually has a hole to let the water out, but that's not helping as there must be a huge puddle of water before it even starts reaching the drain in one of the edges of the machine.
I might try that adsorbent trick, though I would imagine that I'd have to add some kind of grating on top of the adsorbent? Because I'd rather not want to place my water bottles into the adsorbent and have it stick to the bottom of the bottles.
The wick will act like a self-priming siphon, and carry (wick) the water out the hole and drip from the lowest point of the wick.
The drain hole is in the bottom, so I can run the wick through it and out of the machine. I hope to simply be able to attach a shred of cloth or something to the end of the wick in order to evaporate the water away to the outside air. That would make a nice, maintenance-free solution.
I've had the wick routed along the outer side of the fridge for a few days now and it managed to remove every last bit of water (when I placed it there were puddles of water all around the fridge) and successfully keeps the fridge dry now. The water evaporates from a piece of cloth attached to the ends of the wick as planned, so the entire system is maintenance-free now. During the first days the cloth piece was totally soaked, but now that the initial puddles were removed it is relatively dry and I could just place it under the bottom of the machine, so it is practically invisible.
Thanks again for that awesome idea!
https://evadry.wpengine.com/product/e-500-renewable-high-cap...
It's basically just a silica gel pack, but you can plug it in when it's saturated to recharge it, and it has a wet/dry indicator.
Then toss it every few months. Mold won’t grow on the salt itself, so could cook with it.
Or use it as driveway deicer.
Or just but the 10kg bags of rock salt in winter for driveway deicer for like $5.
So it's possible to save space _and_ energy.
Now the standup kitchen fridges in houses really bother me. Every time I see someone open one, I imagine seeing all that cold air being sucked out by the opening door and falling on the ground.
I wonder if transparent door would be a gain here, with worse thermal insulation but allowing to locate things and contemplate before opening the door and allowing the cold to escape to the floor.
I imagine that as soon as most of the cool air has flowed out of it (which should happen quite quickly), the additional energy loss is minimal
There are compromise versions where there is a small door at half height in the big door, through which you can get the bottles/milk crates out of the side of the door.
What I am wondering is if there is a way to solve this with at technical solution that keeps the current standup design but makes it energy efficient.
For example: An opening at the bottom of the door that sucks cold air in when the door opens and transports it to the top back of the compartment. While open, most of the cold air would be saved and it's only a ventilator that's running for a few seconds
People quickly learn to ignore the beep while they "quickly make breakfast" and then put the sausages and eggs back in the fridge and close the door after eating breakfast. #billpayerfrustratedwithhisfamily
I suspect the big problem with chest freezers/fridges for most homes is their shape. People want a flat counter on everything that they can leave stuff on, while still being able to access the fridge, so a fridge opening from the top isn't going to fit anywhere. But I've been thinking: how about a chest fridge that slides out? That way it can disappear underneath cupboards or counters, while you can still access them without having to clean up your counter top.
There is the issue of cleanup and condensation. That is something would would need to be solved or at least be made easy to clean.
Air has negligible thermal mass compared to everything else solid or liquid in the fridge. As long as you don't leave the door open long enough that fridge contents themselves start warming up, the energy losses are minimal.
Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:
My fridge is around 1.0 x 0.5 x 0.5 m, giving a volume of 0.25 m3.
Outside temp is around 25 C, inside the fridge is around 5 C.
Air specific heat capacity is around 1000 J/m3/K.
If the fridge only contains air (it does not), and all air gets cycled out when I open the door (it does not), the fridge needs to pump out 5 kJ of heat after each door opening.
I don't know what's the typical efficiency, but let's say the fridge pumps out as much heat as you put electrical work into it (COP=2).
That's around 0.0014 kWh wasted per door opening.
It's nothing compared to just steady state consumption of a closed fridge.
Typically your house air will have a dew point above 5C. That means, when it enters your fridge, dew will condense on the inside. The latent heat of condensation is really high. Just 10 grams of water could be 22 kilojoules of energy released.
That water will eventually end up as ice on the evaporator (since the evaporator coil in a fridge-freezer typically has to run sub-freezing because it is shared with the freezer). Thats more energy loss (3 kJ for our 10 grams).
Then the defrost mechanism will kick in to melt it into the drain - which is a resistive heater normally. So 3kJ again. The resistive heater typically heats far more than it needs though - a bunch of heat will be wasted into the metal of the coil and air in the fridge - which in turn will need more refrigeration to correct.
So all in all, the energy loss of opening the door of the fridge is dominated by the water you're letting into the fridge, not the energy loss of the cold air.
This analysis is tricky enough and with enough variables (house humidity, design of fridge, amount of other 'wet' food in the fridge, etc.) that I haven't seen anyone attempt to come up with a cost number, either numerically or experimentally.
The defrost thing I guess depends on the fridge. Mine has two coils and the one in the 5 C non-freezer section generally stays above the freezing point when the compressor is not running. It does does not have a resistive heater.
Also, if your ambient relative humidity is less than 100, not all or none of the water will condense.
But 10g of water freezing is extreme. There are mechanisms on the fridge to avoid the water freezing.
That is <6 grams if you sucked every molecule out of 0.25 m^3.
Air at 0 C still has about 5 grams/m^3, so the number would actually be lower.
50% RH at 25C to 100% RH at 0 would condense ~1.6 grams of water from the air .
To hit 10g you need 45+ grams per m^3, which would be 100% humidity at >37C (eg, the tropics)
But the inside of your fridge and all the goods inside has the surface area of hundreds of ice cold beers.
It isn't just a matter of how much room air you trapped in the fridge, but how much passes the beers in the fridge while you have the door open - perhaps 10x as much.
Maybe if you open the door, the moving air heats the things inside much faster?
edit: in a sister thread they state that the humidity of air plays a more significant role.
But still, that one fridge was a very significant portion of the total house electricity use.
I tried measuring if getting a new one would save power and was affordable somewhat cost effective but the short story is that the upfront cost could only be recuperated even by a tiny bit when kWh prices rise far into the 1 Euro/kWh.
Most people keep way more than they should or need in a fridge, and often best to go straight to freezer to avoid wastage if you are not right on to eating leftovers.
So this does not save energy because you don't run a fridge, you use extra in the freezer for the glycol bottles bthan if you just used it as a freezer, but your fridge is now small with a top lid instead of front doors, and you can heavily insulate a cooler very easily to make it super efficient.
"Fridges use more energy than any other single appliance in a typical Australian home." - https://hipages.com.au/article/energy_efficient_fridges_and_...
Then there is milk, butter, veges etc that easily fit in 65l cooler for most families.
They refuse to buy a new one because it hasn't broken down yet.
I wish government put money into guidance on these matters for domestic goods.
Vertical freezer with some 7 chests which is many more years older takes 0,6-1kWh/24h - probably depends when we open it and when not.
Probably better to look at monthly (October) stats: 38,64kWh Fridge, 21,81kWh for freezer.
Hmm, August 40/35; July 27/24. Dunno why it fluctuates so much. Ofcourse, October was heating season, but that doesn't seem to impact freezer for worse. Which is weird - it is 2 meters apart from heat source. But yeah, summer could hahve
Depending on electricity prices, it's probably a better call to not change it.
This means the OP's parents' fridge is probably running 100% of the time and doesn't manage to transport the heat outside anymore faster than it is re-entering. Basically it's broken.
A random 18 cu ft fridge claims it will use closer to 400 kWh / year, or around 1.1 kWh / day.
The random commenter on this thread has an 8 cu ft fridge which uses around 0.5 kWh / day.
Is the GP's parent's fridge "old" or is it "giant"?
Its factory rating when it was brand new was 237 kWh/year. Instead, it's around 683 actually (~1.87kWh/day)
But it typically lasts 10 before it needs repairs (neighbors replaced the compressor).
Typically it's way more than 10 for fridges and freezers.
I just recently replaced a chest freezer that was 24 years old. It was still working, but started to consume excessive amounts of power because it apparently lost the ability to efficiently transport heat - it just managed to cool a very small area of the surface inside, even though constructively it should cool over almost all the surface area. As a result the compressor ran almost constantly to keep the insides cool.
The OPs' parents freezer probably has the same problem.
FYI: After transport you need to wait some time to let the oil in the compressor settle before turning it on. A level ground is also highly recommended.
What does this mean? I know you’re not saying that it leaks that much refrigerant over a year normally.
(I have no idea if this comparison is accurate, but I do know that coolers commonly contain gasses that you don't want to release)
For example, the refrigerant R-410A does about 2000 more greenhouse warming over a 100 year period. So a leak of 1 kg of R-410A is equivalent to about 2 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
10 years ago I bought an expensive tumble drier with a heap pump in order to be nice to the environment. After a few years there was an issue with it and I called a repairman. He vented the refrigerant and refilled it as part of his repair.
My calculation said it was an equivalent emission of about 1300kg CO2. Environmental impact immediately went negative.
This will be an issue when everyone is heating their house with heat pumps. They are amazing, but you have to follow the rules when repairing and scrapping them.
But…
At least in the US kitchen refrigerators have moved to hydrocarbon refrigerants (R600a a.k.a. isobutane) which have a much lower global warming potential of around 3.3x that of CO2. Prior to that it was R134a, and I'm pretty sure R410a was mostly limited to HVAC applications. More to the point a modern refrigerator has on the order of a couple ounces (so maybe 50 grams) of refrigerant not an entire kilo.
Don't fuck around with the sealed system unless you've the proper training. It's not rocket science but there are any number of non-obvious ways for things to go wrong. R600a is (in)flammable, R134a decomposes into hydrogen fluoride when exposed to flame, and R410a is a blend of things so you can't really top it off.
Edit: Copper fittings if you're lucky. We're starting to see some bits made out of aluminum now so (assuming you want to do the job correctly) you'll either have to get real good at brazing aluminum to copper or you'll have to invest the $$$ in the crimp tools.
I'm fine with sweating copper. I know nothing of dealing with the refrigerant beyond the fact that you need a license to do so here.
If you run the compressor in an orientation it isn't designed for, the motor will get 'liquid slugging', which is unrecoverable - you'll need to buy a new fridge.
Also, the question is not dumb at all.
* People in wheelchairs.
* Children and shorter people.
* Cleaning is hard if there are messes or spills.
* You can't see what's in a chest fridge very easily which is a problem if there is more than one person in the household.
* Shelves are really useful when you have things that can't be stacked on top of one another
If that's not what you're stating, then what _are_ you stating? I don't get it.
Applies to a majority of people.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
The usability issues with chest freezers are real and it's quite likely that a big portion of the energy savings is because the chest freezers in question don't do auto defrost. Plenty of people really don't want to deal with regularly emptying everything out to let all the ice buildup melt.
I feel my comment was just a response to the article text. Particularly the paragraph stating: "So - WHY mediocre food-spoiling fridges are being made? WHO makes decisions to manufacture them? Who awards them "stars" and other misleading awards? Why people continue to buy and use energy wasting and food-spoiling devices? Does anyone care about understanding anything?"
I would like all fridges to be as efficient as chest fridges but I think they are impractical for small and medium houses, elderly people, families, disabled people, short people and people who can never remember what they have in their fridge. I think they are a niche product that is only suitable for a tiny proportion of people.
PS. On a personal note my quick comment seems to have stressed you out so I'll endeavour to write clear non-gear grinding comments and you should probably get off the internet for a bit
I grew up with a chest freezer in my house as a child. I never had any problems with it as a kid, I didn't need to get kilos of meat out of it, because I was a child and my parents cooked food for me. It doubled up as a kitchen countertop, but you'd have to keep it clear or you couldn't use it, which is a usability shit.
Did you? Tell me about your experience.
I'll say the real issues with chest freezers is that unless you design your kitchen around them they end up taking more space.
The best use IMHO for a chest freezer is for long-term storage of food that you occasionally need to use. I know people who use them for storing extra food, they buy huge amounts in bulk and even running the freezer 24/7 they save a lot of food money doing this. Most people (myself included) probably don't have the luxury of space.
> I feel my comment was just a response to the article text. Particularly the paragraph stating: "So - WHY mediocre food-spoiling fridges are being made? WHO makes decisions to manufacture them? Who awards them "stars" and other misleading awards? Why people continue to buy and use energy wasting and food-spoiling devices? Does anyone care about understanding anything?"
Yeah, the article in question is short sighted and I disagree with many of the points the author makes. Usually I'll quote the text I'm responding to, instead of the article in general. This makes it less likely for some random internet nob head to come along and misinterpret what you're saying ;).
> I would like all fridges to be as efficient as chest fridges medium houses, elderly people, families, disabled people, short people and people who can never remember what they have in their fridge.
No, I disagree
> I think they are impractical for small houses
Yes, I agree
> I think they are a niche product that is only suitable for a tiny proportion of people.
Yes, I agree
*But they're still useful!*
For individual use, sure they're a tiny proportion, but what about industrial use, catering?
They're useful for specific situations and poo-pooing them _ENTIRELY_ because of some issues is a short sighted approach that I see EVERYWHERE in real life and online, and it boggles my mind.
You can say your post doesn't say they're useless for everyone, but I would say it heavily implies it.
> PS. On a personal note my quick comment seems to have stressed you out so I'll endeavour to write clear non-gear grinding comments
You shouldn't change how you write because I took umbrage with it, that's an issue with the internet today, don't change who you are just because some arsehole online didn't like what you wrote!
> and you should probably get off the internet for a bit
You should probably stop telling people what to do.
Also practical reasons, in horizontal config it's way harder to avoid my tomatoes getting squished by leftover casseroles, let alone having a small item roll around to the bottom never to be found again.
- Put the fridge under a counter on rollers (with a cableway for the necessary electrical hookup).
- Put rolling shelves(with lips) inside the fridge to allow ready access to the bottom storage areas.
Even if consumers won't trade off a little bit of convenience for energy efficiency today, they probably will when electricity is much more expensive.
I'm inclined to think that engineering improvements to a vertical fridge is easier than the changes required for a chest fridge.
For cleaning, you can have paper at the bottom and just remove the paper when something messy happens.
To see what's inside and to store items hard to stack you can put basic wire shelves inside it.
So what should we do - ban vertical fridges? Ban vertical fridges higher than the size of a small child?
That being said my mother keeps all the Christmas food on the balcony because it solves both the cooling and storage space problems.
We have a normal furnace/air conditioner combo (I live in a climate where summer air conditioning is essential), it has no concept of outside air temperature. I really would like a system where it doesn't have the concept of being set to cool/off/heat, but rather a concept of ideal temperature/heat-to/cool-to. Before running the high energy systems it looks at the outside air temp to see if it would be more efficient to turn on a fan to bring in outside air. It also will use that fan to adjust the temperature towards ideal but will not use the high energy systems to do so.
The HVAC should also be able to communicate with the refrigerator. If heat is desired in the house the refrigerator uses coils inside the house to dispose of it's waste heat. If heat is not desired it uses outside coils.
A huge part of an AC system (and, a fridge is basically a small AC unit) is dehumidifying as well. Functionally, you'd now need to add a de-humidification circuit to the system if you used outside air, since you don't have any humidity control.
Have two transparent interior rolling shutters. Open only one section on selection motion.
Or just have the best of both worlds, a chest fridge, with a transparent interior, which moves upward, allowing access via a rolling shutter.
Or have a airlock, were a automated retrieving gadget brings you your product in standardized containers? Similar to ice cream dispsensers or softdrink coolers?
Basically a portal crane traversing the chest cooler, extracting a "cooling" pillar on demand, which then only guarants acess on demand.
Joey's known for the Debian installer and git-annex, among other things.
I always thought that design would also work well for the fridge section. Instead of shelves, you have drawers, which better keep the cold air in, and are also easier to use - no more reaching over things to get something at the back of the shelf.
Or perhaps there's a market for some kind of sliding drawer to replace shelves in existing machines. Unfortunately I think they are all completely non-standard sizes. Another area that is crying out for standardization, modularity etc.
I still have a normal upright fridge in my kitchen though. I think it's take some clever planning to make it so that a chest freezer fits into a kitchen decor since floor/counter space is usually the toughest thing to save when designing a kitchen.
The efficiency increase is also greatly exaggerated in the article. For one see the comment by avian in here. Secondly that converted freezer has a lot more insulation than a fridge because of its thicker walls (which take more space) and also the lack of ventilation for moisture than any modern fridge has. And thirdly we have no real comparison with the same usage, as far as I know that person might open it every 2 days.
If we ignore all those problems we might as well weld a box shut and be happy with perfect efficiency at zero usability.
If everyone in Uk (about 25 million households) used his fridge it would save
25m kwh / day is 25 GWh / day or 9125 Gwh or
9Tera Wh
per year?
UK uses 300 Tera Wh per year of elec. (UN source from datacommons.org)
So changing fridges will save 1/30 of electrical use.
Just how much of an argument is there for funding a "not so optional" change to peoples lifestyles and domestic arrangements?
Some combination of household goods, household insulation, reduced car useage
It's good to live in a big house and have a choice. But realistically almost no one else has that choice.
The drawer compartments could have holes (for air to circulate) when closed (like current "grill" shelves), and a mechanism that closes them and isolates the drawn-out drawer from the one below and above it.
This way you lose at most one drawer worth of cold air and heat only one drawer worth of products. The mechanism would be quite simple to build (just mechanical, shouldn't need any fancy electronics).
The downside being that you would have rigid fixed compartments (each shelve's size) whereas fridges tend to have adjustable shelves.
Seems to me a chest fridge is simpler.
About that other kind of convenience, shouldn't a chest fridge be long and shallow to have everything reachable from the opening without having to lift stuff and dig?
There's a tradeoff between interior volume and convenience. And since most people who want convenience get a vertical model, I think interior volume wins a lot of the time. Someone who buys 1/2 of a cow, or takes home a deer just needs to freeze the whole thing. They don't necessarily need convenient access to all of the contents.
Essentially, the chest freezer could become part of the kitchen work surfaces or it could be come an island work area, not taking up valuable real estate - it would be the valuable real estate. I have always thought this could be the way instead of vertical standing models.
[1] https://www.pouted.com/fully-automated-car-parking-systems/
Our upright fridge freezer has deep drawers in the freezer compartment, presumably for this reason.
THey are not as practical, as you have to stack stuff onto each other and it is easier to find space for a vertical fridge in a kitchen, but from a pure energy consumtion perspective this makes sense.
If the mentioned energy consumtion is correct, it is really quite low. A good new fidge that size without freezer uses about 90 kWh per year, which is about twice as much as his fridge.
If there's anyone else like me who prefers Watts, this equates to an average power consumption of slightly over 4W (100watt*h over 24 hours).
(1 watt = 8.76 kWh/yr)
https://www.emporiaenergy.com/how-the-vue-energy-monitor-wor...
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Whirlpool-16-cu-ft-Manual-Defros...
But yeah it's convenience over efficiency and it would require also a lot of empty space above fridge which can be ulitized inb much better way, while there is hardly any space wasted above my ~210cm tall fridge and I still use the top to store some things which I could not to with chest fridge.
When moving such a fridge, you need to leave it powered off for a long time before plugging it back in (and probably before initially moving it, just to be safe).
Otherwise, the cheap compressors they use will foul the coolant lines with oil, ruining the fridge. The purpose of waiting is to allow anything that started to slosh up time to trickle back down. Also, keep the fridge as level as possible while moving it.
(Appears common enough that BestBuy has it as a search flag).
I like the idea of thermal mass in a refrigerator or freezer (it took me a while to figure out why milk at home would never last to it's shelf date--the grocery store has a huge thermal mass to it's dairy cases, the milk on the shelf gets much less exposure to warm air than the milk at home) but if you're going to eliminate dead air space I think it's best done with empty boxes, not water.
I admire efficiency a lot but I don’t think digging around in a chest freezer is worth saving $31.50 a year. Others may feel differently.
80 million x $31.5 = approx $2.5 Billion a year.
Wow. That is something amazing - just goes to show how wasteful our society is.
ie. if you are getting it from walmart for $100, it's probably garbage insulation and the compressor will run all the time
Thank you for all the ingenious ideas for a chest-style refrigerator/freezer. I have a need for one, and the tips and tricks posted here will save energy and make some old folks very happy.
So, thanks.
Q2: It's impossible to go to the other end of the galaxy, live there for a few days, and come back in 10 days, even at the speed of light. How do you explain your trip?
A: Michel told me that his journey was made using what he called "trans-substantiation". The main part of the galactic journey does not take place in space-time, but outside it.
You can only leave space-time (or return to it) at a sufficient distance from the nearest star, otherwise you will explode.
Of course it depends on many things, but if you adapt a little bit you will not need a fridge. Fresh food is more healthy, anyway.
I just got into the situation of living without a fridge while constantly travelling between two places. After a while I realized that I do not need a fridge at all. Even after settling on one place I still do not need it.
Try it yourself.