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I plan to buy a house next spring, so I'll almost certainly need a new refrigerator. There's a problem: they don't make the fridge I want, and never have. I can't figure out why.
Refrigerators today are quite different than antique ones, using a different coolent because of the ozone layer, better insulation, the use of rare earth magnets in the motors, and other improvements.
But they're still incredibly wasteful.
The fridge I want has two vents outside, much like dryer vents but insulated. There is an electronic outside thermometer, one in the refrigerator, and one inside the freezer.
When the temperature outside is above seventy fareignheight, the heat taken from the fridge is vented outside, so the air conditioner doesn't have to work harder to cool the hot air refrigerators let out inside the house.
Under seventy the air is vented into, rather than outside, the house. If the heat is on, it doesn't work as hard.
But most of all is winter. It's ludicrous that we pump the heat from our freezers with a lot of energy expenditure, while freezing air is right outside that could come in the intake hose and freeze and cool your food. At freezing, this fridge doesn't need the compressor at all and compressors take a lot of energy to operate.
I don't know why nobody is selling those things.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Saturday November 07 2015, @08:28PM
Maybe because it sounds like it would be more work to install?
But yeah. I'm surprised I never thought of that before. It sounds like such an obvious idea now that you say it.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by throwaway28 on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:51PM
The fridge that I want, that no-one is selling either, places the heat rejection coils on the front, instead of the bottom or back. After 6 to 18 months of use, bottom-mounted coils on normal fridges are a dusty mess that's next to impossible to clean, and probably don't transfer heat that well. I'm sick of that. Place the coils on the front, where they'll never get dirty, and even if they do, they can be cleaned effortlessly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday November 08 2015, @12:36PM
For a bad time run the heat flow calculations, something like a cheap modern fridge that only pushes a couple hundred watts of heat (because its got great insulation) would need ducts to the winter world better insulated than the house itself to "save" the hundred or so watts. You could require fridges to be mounted on an outside wall to keep the duct short, but ...
Note that air handling is not free. If a blower at the end of a duct takes 100 watts to push enough air, trying to save 100 watts thermal isn't a big win.
Also don't forget to deal with outside air filters, wasps trying to set up a nest inside your fridge heat exchanger and all that. And water leakage from the vents.
Also WRT energy flow, note that the electrical-caused heat output isn't wasted in the winter it just saves some natgas in the furnace.
Given an extra couple hundred bucks you'd save more energy with two foot thick walls than very complicated air handling.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @04:25PM
And two lamps would use about 80W. So you want to save power and $$$$ it's probably easier to save it elsewhere than have some complicated vent and house renovation to make your fridge just a bit more efficient.