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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I have twice lost a fridge full of food due to spurious GFCI trips, once when I was a recent graduate and it was a painful experience financially.

I now make sure my fridge/freezer is NOT on a GFCI. I'll take my chances of getting a 120VAC shock from my fridge [which is attention-getting, but very unlikely to be injurious].

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Check out the YoLink temperature sensors on Amazon. They are amazing for monitoring our secondary freezer. All their sensors have been great. Temp for fridge/freezers, leak detectors, temp+humidity for basement, they have a motion sensor that is a magnet you can place in the back of your mailbox if you want to know when mail is delivered. Their door sensor can be installed on overhead garage doors by a magnet and a velcro strip for the part that goes on the wall. They also have a 1/4 mile range and the sensor can be inside your fridge/freezer and still connect. App is great, no monthly fee, you get notifications on your phone you can also get a small number of SMS messages for free. All notifications/limits are configurable.

Also funny how fridges are required to have their own circuit, but newer fridges are increasingly vfd/inverter drive, and don’t have surge power draws anymore. They use a few hundred watts continuously and that’s it.

I’d be more quickly to find out my fridge died if the lights in the kitchen stopped working.

Not sure why fridges don’t just have a battery-powered alarm that goes off when the temperature gets too high for too long.

I have a lot of power surges in my area. Recently, the old power shut off, then power back on in 3 seconds thing happened - and the surge was enough to pop my fridge motors and cause a $900 repair.

I upgraded them to not only a surge protector, but this little neat shut off device. It's a device that goes between the fridge and the wall outlet, and basically if for any reason this device loses power - it shuts off the power to the powered device for a minimum of 3 minutes. This way the power can blink 100 times in 3 minutes, and my fridge won't have to eat 100 surges. It will just happily sit off for 3 minutes, and then come back on.

Can you share what device you're using for the 3-minute shut-off and recovery?

I have this guy

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D7KP8S4

But am not partial to this brand or anything. But it seems to do what it says it will do.

What kind of fridge do you have that draws several hundred watts continuously? I haven’t tested my fridge, but I have a very large chest freezer that never draws more than ~35W. Surely a fridge can’t be 10x worse than that.

I seriously doubt that your freezer max draw is 35W. An Energy Star freezer can only average ~25W across the entire year. I doubt that the peak is less than 1.4x the average draw.

A fridge max power draw is usually during the defrost cycle. My defrost heater measures a bit over 500W.

You’re probably right, but I did watch my freezer plugged into a kill-a-watt for a while, and even when the compressor first kicked on, I never saw anything higher than 35W. Maybe the kill-a-watt is inaccurate, or maybe it doesn’t update fast enough, I’m not sure. Another factor, too: it doesn’t have any sort of auto defrost.

Different models and different designs and everything, but just as another data point, I recall my chest freezer pulling 300W+ when the compressor kicks on, and likely higher transient spikes, as it kept burning out the fuse on my 500W transformer, and I had to switch to a 1kW one.

A shock on 120VAC can absolutely kill. It’s not the volts which kill you, it’s the amps, and it’s specifically why GFCI trip at somewhere between 5mA and 30mA (depending) — it’s because those are not levels as likely to cause fibrillation.

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