THE Energy Efficiency & Appliance Thread (merged)

TreeFarmer · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 26, 2007 Posts: 237

Ham it seems like you are taking two separate ideas and trying to meld them into one post. If I understand what you are asking, here is my take on it.
As for the "war" between the furnace and the refrigerator, during the winter this does not matter. You need to heat your home so the "war" only results in your getting some of your heat from your refrigerator and thus needing less heat from your furnace.

Now, when you don't need to heat your house (summer) then the refrigerator acts like a heater by transferring heat from within the refrigerator to outside of the refrigerator plus any heat created from the friction of the refrigerator motor and compressor.

You also mentioned lowering the thermostat in your house, this would be an energy saving move because a cooler house uses less energy to stay at a lower temperature when heating is needed. In this case, your furnace would run less and yes even your refrigerator would run less.
You know, if you use AC in the summer, moving your refrigerator onto your back porch would reduce the amount of work your AC would need to do.
TF

Hagakure_Leofman

This relates to 'cool cupboards'. I think david holmgren had an innovative method of cooling some of his food storage cupboards.
From memory, he installed pipes that ran beneath the soil in his glasshouse and off through the building structure to his cupboards. As the plants were watered, the air in the pipes would cool and circulate through to his cupboards.

Something like that.
I've got a storage room that I'm going to vent from beneath the house (cooler air) and a hot air vent out through the roof. Unfortunately, no basement. Any other methods of cooling these kinds of rooms are invited!

smallpoxgirl · Moderator Joined: Nov 08, 2004 Posts: 4569

snax · Tar Sands Joined: Jan 20, 2007 Posts: 74

On that note, one thing people can and should do to reduce the load on refrigeration is acclimate it's contents if necessary before putting them inside of it.

It is more efficient to let ambient outside temperatures or even the AC system do the cooling than any point of use consumer refrigerator.

shaunpagan

In the house I moved out of 1 1/2 years ago, I built a system that would exchange the heat in my fridge with the cold air outside. I built it out of computer water cooling, beer making, and aquarium parts. The energy usage of my fridge dropped to 1/20th of it's normal use. The fridge would still need to kick on in order to keep the freezer cold, though.

The system I built used a device called a thermo cube. This is a little device that only turns power on when the temperature is below freezing. This went out side. I didn't want my system to operate if the temperature outside was warmer than freezing.

If the temperature was below freezing outside, it would turn on. In the fridge, I had a thermostatically controlled outlet that I purchased from a beer making company. I would set this to 36 degrees and I set the regular fridge temp to 39 degrees.

Inside the fridge and outside, I had two matching radiators with computer fans attached to them. When the fridge called to be cooled, an aquarium pump would circulate glycol (I know, bad inside a fridge) from the fridge through a hole I cut in the back of my fridge, through insulated tubing, to the outside of my house where I had the other radiator. The glycol would then pass back in to the fridge colder than it started.

The best part was that the system was absolutely quiet. The only sound that could be heard was when the fridge was open, the computer fan could be heard.

WisJim

snax · Tar Sands Joined: Jan 20, 2007 Posts: 74

I was speaking specifically of items like beverages that are often warm from storage or the store and have a relatively high specific heat density.

New items are typically already cold or unrefrigerated as needed - but when opening stuff that requires refrigeration afterward, it also makes sense to make an effort to acclimatize it before opening.

Keith_McClary