Agree with the others here that this is absolutely not a fair comparison. Most likely the door of the old one was not sealing well, hence the continuous running and frost buildup. I have a late 30s Frigidaire that I restored a few years ago which has been taking around 200kWh/y (70W compressor, ~33% duty cycle.)
Yeah, the title is misleading. The article says that one of the compressors on the old one was running constantly - if you applied the same failure mode to the new refrigerator, the difference would be significantly less.
Given modern minimalistic build standards, the modern compressor would probably overheat and fail if run continuously 24/7. I am reminded of the old simpsons bit where they make a tent in front of the refrigerator.
I would expect a refrigerator that has EC motors running the compressor(s) and fan(s) to be around 2-2.5x as efficient as one with fixed speed motors, based on what I know about variable frequency drives and three-phase induction motors. For those, 80% speed uses 50% of the power, 63% uses 25% of the power. For an 1800 rpm motor that is 1440 rpm and 1134 rpm. VFDs work well for most applications with variable torque (fans and pumps), but applications requiring constant torque (saws, grinders, etc) are better served by fixed speed starters.
> variable frequency drives and three-phase induction motors. For those, 80% speed uses 50% of the power, 63% uses 25% of the power.
You’re presumably thinking of the “Affinity Laws”, which, according to Wikipedia (and plenty of other sources), “apply to pumps, fans, and hydraulic turbines. In these rotary implements, the affinity laws apply both to centrifugal and axial flows.”
This is, IMO, one of the worst kinds of science writing. Wikipedia, and plenty of other sources, make little mention of when the do and don’t apply or, relatedly, why they’re true and why they can’t always be true.
They generally apply to situations where a pump is pumping fluid through something like a filter or a long pipe where the pipe is a closed loop or at least the ends are at the same elevation (e.g. a swimming pool pump, except when pumping from a pool into a higher hot tub). So you have no actual work being done by moving fluid, and you can run the pump slower, and thus move less fluid per unit time, thus reducing friction in a manner that the pressure that the pump needs to overcome goes all the way to zero as the flow rate approaches zero.
But the affinity laws are not really anything fundamental about pumps, and they certainly do not override conservation of energy.
Now consider a refrigerator. The compressor is pumping refrigerant from an (approximately) fixed low pressure to a fixed high pressure. (The fluid goes back from high pressure to low pressure via a capillary tube or expansion valve or similar lossy device -- it gets its pressure increased in the gas phase and decreased in the liquid phase.) There's some friction, but after subtracting friction, the pressure is independent of flow rate, and thus the work done per unit flow is independent of flow rate, and the pump power scales linearly with flow as opposed to super-linearly as the affinity laws suggest.
Also, the compressor is a positive-displacement pump, and the affinity laws don't even pretend to apply to these.
(A well pump is another common system where the affinity laws will lead to nonsensical results. If you want to size a well pump properly, you need to know the height that you're raising the water, the output pressure you need, and the range of flows that you want. And then you look at the actual measured performance curves of the pumps (and their drives) that you are considering, and you pick something appropriate.)
All that being said, variable-speed fridges exist, and they're kind of nice in that they try to run continuously and quietly instead of alternating between full-power (and loud) and all the way off. And they are probably a bit more efficient because there's less friction and because the motors are likely to be more efficient three-phase designs instead of the not-actually-amazing single-phase motors you'll find in older fridges.
> variable-speed fridges exist, and they're kind of nice in that they try to run continuously and quietly instead of alternating between full-power (and loud) and all the way off.
Modern continuous variable speed compressor fridges drive me absolutely crazy. They sound like two ceramic plate rubbing together with some maddening flutter.
Some also add incredibly annoying high pitch whines. That seemingly nobody seems to notice but me. In the same vein as coils whine from power supplies and other modern electronic.
Old bang bang fridges are loud, on lower frequency, and with a sound that is more consistent and stable. Not varying one second to the next, which I find easier to ignore.
I have started looking at how reasonable it is to move the compressor of my expensive and low quality 2025 fridge across the wall into the garage (refrigerant capture and refill, brazing new lines etc).
VFDs need really good grounding. Make sure you have a solid earth ground or you can get arcing across the motor bearings. This makes a sound that’s often described as “fluting,” and I think that might be your problem. If it is, you need to fix that before your bearings are trashed and you have to replace the motor.
The outlet are grounded with a thin non insulated copper wire secured to the nearest water copper pipe, itself also bounded to the iron gas pipe (this is 1950 electrical). I am not sure I can call this a solid earth ground.
It's not just modern electronics. I used to be able to know, the minute I walked in, if there were any CRT TVs on in someones house. Flyback coil whine was a constant presence.
> Some also add incredibly annoying high pitch whines. That seemingly nobody seems to notice but me.
That drove me crazy for about a week trying to figure out what the noise was coming from... Pinhole water pipe leak? Cat stuck in the flue? Once I realized what it was, I didn't mind it much. It is better than loud old compressors suddenly kicking on and burrr'ing away then stopping.
> I have started looking at how reasonable it is to move the compressor of my expensive and low quality 2025 fridge across the wall into the garage (refrigerant capture and refill, brazing new lines etc).
It would be worth looking into commercial refrigeration as well, you can get a refrigerator with a remote condenser and I’m sure you could find used equipment. Either way you’re going to have to run refrigerant piping and plumb in condensate drains.
Variable-compressor fridges will be more thermodynamically efficient, as the heat transfer happens more gradually, so temperature differences across the heat pump will be lower (e.g. because the condenser will have more time to gradually transfer heat to the room, it won't get as hot). And coefficient of performance for a heat pump is higher if the temperature difference is smaller. Another way to achieve this might be with a variable-displacement compressor (which is how modern car AC systems work, rather than cycling on/off).
Unlikely. The thermal timescales are long enough that the fridge turning on and off doesn't mean the temperatures vary wildly. That's why they can do it in the first place!
Central heating on the other hand... I'm definitely never buying a boiler without opentherm.
This reply is amazing, thank you! This gives me a much better understanding of the work done by a chilled water pump in a closed loop vs a refrigerant pump with an expansion valve in the loop and in which situations the affinity laws apply to.
I’m just a dumb electrical PM who knows enough to be dangerous, and I only know how things like heat exchangers, pumps, and fans work on a very basic level so this is illuminating.
It's still functional though, the point is comparing 'keep running the old tired one' vs 'replace with new', not 'how well were they made then vs now'.
I feel like a more appropriate - or at least a more interesting - comparison would be “fix the old one” vs “replace with new.” Replacing an old broken product with a new unbroken one is changing two variables, not one.
Now, if the author would like to break their New refrigerator and report back, I’ll take it as an interesting result.
Totally fine to choose as the author did, but for others who might face a similar choice: repairing a thermostat in a fridge is dramatically easier than fixing almost anything in a dishwasher. I did that with my fridge - cost <$20 for the part and maybe 30 minutes of work. Your (EU) kilometrage may vary.
I suspect the power savings would be much less dramatic with a fixed thermostat.
It takes a long time getting to know your dishwasher but my 2014 model was actually not that hard to debug and fix. Need to be able to source the parts of course. I was surprised how repairable it was. Will watch out for it when I need to buy another one.
Indeed, been there. Just getting the dishwasher out of its cubby hole is a major effort, and involves dealing with not just the wiring but the hoses too. And if it's an older house, chances are good that the dishwasher had to be crammed in with a certain amount of hacking, cussing, and persuasion.
The fridge rolls out into the room on its own wheels.
Many dishwashers are supposed to be wood-screwed into the surrounding cabinets! Recently installed one for a friend and was surprised to see that instruction.
Meanwhile, with the exception of ice makers/water dispensers (1/4 PEX), fridges don't have to deal with hoses for the most part. So much easier IME.
This must be dependent on your country's customs, I suppose. I've taken out dishwashers quite a few times and it was actually fairly easy. No wheels, true, but cables and hoses were never much of a problem in my case.
Nah, dishwashers are pretty light too. With a muscle mass of 1% I usually just flip it over to work on it. This is just peak HN, PhDs still phased by something requiring an 8th grade level of education. In the US, the supply is usually a screw on, the drain a clamp and if the wiring isn’t already a quick connect just throw some Wagos on.
Amen. I put my dishwasher in myself so I get to curse myself for that hacking.
Worst was sourcing the parts though. Getting the thing out, effectively getting it up on blocks to run it and see the issue was hard work. Getting the specific totally non-standard o-ring size out of the manufacturer was impossible. In the end I resorted to siliconing but I just cannot dump something like that over a 5c part.
I just replaced the drain pump and motherboard on my GE dishwasher and it was super easy. Everything was easy to access and all the major parts had a QR code on them making parts lookup idiot proof.
When the parts showed up they came with all the clamps and other replacement hardware that I didn’t even know I needed.
I've found cheap after-market thermostats to have short lifetimes... Original lasted 20 years... Replacement started misbehaving in just 2 years.
So now my policy is to retrofit all old refrigerators with digital STC-1000 thermostats. A bit more work to cut out some plastic, split the hot wire and tap into a neutral wire (easy enough to follow the bulb) but cheaper, super reliable, and gives very consistent and highly controllable results.
Two such upgraded refrigerators are still working without an issue several years later. Though both required replacing the relay (with a solid state relay/capacitor unit) at about the same time, and one after replacement of the evaporator fan motor due to noise issues.
I've found US dishwashers pretty easy to fix, but Korean and German ones can be a bit more of a pain, and these are the ones built for the US market. I've heard that European models often have water softeners built in.
Yeah I was wondering if there was perhaps some regional differences. The one time I did a DIY fix of my dishwasher I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was. They're largely very simple devices, and aside from a couple screws to keep them from tipping, they slide right out of the opening they're in.
> [...] German ones can be a bit more of a pain
I did replace my dishwasher a few years ago with a Bosch. Uh-oh!
Not sure about dishwasher but our Bosch washing machine was fixed with little real fuss other than needing to have torx screw-bits. I quite admired the engineering.
We too have a Bosch dishwasher so - like you - we'll see how that goes...
Looking at their designs, this seems to be the case with other white goods too; I suspect it's because US designs are relatively old and simple since they were among the first, while foreign designs are more highly space- and cost-optimised at the expense of repairability and possibly robustness.
Also: if you find ice forming in your fridge, or uneven cooling inside, it may be due to a clogged drain tube. This was the root cause of my fridge breaking: tube in the back clogged -> condensation backed up around the evaporator coils -> froze solid -> blocked circulation fan -> incorrect thermal readings, warm/frozen spots in fridge.
Depends. My last fridge the thermostat went bad and it couldn’t be fixed because they embedded the entire thing into the foam. Terrible design. Was a whirlpool.
That's similar to what sent my last Samsung fridge to its next home. Samsung apparently had some problems with wire movement in the door hinge, so they changed the design and embedded the wires in glue/foam/whatever. So now if you have a problem with those wires, which happens because it's a hinge ... you get to replace the whole door at least. Turns out to be an expensive pain in the ass if the fridge is more than a few years old, it was more time- and cost-effective to get a new fridge at that point.
A 21 kWh/month it's 252 kwh/annum (I guess?), which is around energy label E in the new EU energy labels.
If you go for energy label A, some fridges have 101 kWh/annum, which is more than half less! I haven't seen many, and they are usually very tall, but hopefully we can see more and more in the future.
The dramatic things with refrigerators is that in most countries people will install them in the kitchen for obvious practicality reasons, which is often also the hottest room of the house/appartment due to ovens, stoves and spending a significant amount of time there. If you think of it, it is bonkers that we put a device meant to keep stuff cold in what is a heated place in northern countries. Some hold houses and building used to have non heated dedicated rooms meant to keep food at a lower temperature naturally in winter but this has pretty much disappeared.
OTOH I live in a coastal city in south of Spain and every time I read a label that said food shouldn't be in a fridge but kept in a fresh and dry storage I ask myself where the eff should I store it there is no place like that unless I am running aircon 24/7 which I certainly won't do.
The ambient temperature differential between the kitchen and other rooms in a house is minimal on average. There’s nothing bonkers about putting the refrigerator in that space. Even a hypothetical 20F temperature rise during an hour long cooking session is basically negligible for the efficiency of a refrigerator that is cooling 24/7.
Putting the refrigerator in an unconditioned space wouldn’t be as big of a win as you think because every time you open the door to the unconditioned space you’re letting cold air into the house. Twice per refrigerator visit all day long adds up.
In the winter you actually benefit from having the refrigerator in your conditioned space because the waste heat goes toward heating your house. It would be lose-lose to put it outside of the house in a cold location.
I Suppose heating fuel is cheaper, or household heat pumps are more efficient, but all of the energy consumed by running the refrigerator becomes waste heat in the same room you are trying to heat. That seems superior to the refrigerator heating a room where the waste heat isn’t useful.
well I don't have one, I rarely ever drink wine at home, but there are dedicated devices for that, I think they are called wine cabinets in english? They could be used to store other things indeed. I have never looked at the energy consumption of these things.
The fridge box is fairly insulated. Temps in my home are consistent all over plus or minus a couple degrees. I think you've overstating the case a lot here. Even with the oven running it doesnt seem to affect the fridge too much. Heck in a lot of warmer climates people leave a spare fridge outside where its battling non-climate controlled air.
In the winter your fridge's waste heat is warming up your kitchen, so if anything, its a bit of a bonus those months.
The only thing I think we could do with fridges is put in a system that pulls cold air in during the winter but that's sawing holes into brick and yet another thing to worry about in regards to mold, critters, moisture, filters, fans, etc. Its just not worth the effort or cost.
I've had this thought before, when seeing labels that talk about kWh/day. The answer is very simple: you pay per kWh. When people want to know power efficiency, what they really want to know is "how much will this cost me to run?". That answer is most easily expressed in kWh per unit time.
Also giving an averaged power drain would be misleading. If the device uses 2.4kW but only for half an hour per day, that's not a 50W device as far as cabling, fuses and other electrical considerations.
In the US, at least, there are some utilities that charge based on maximum kW (demand) and total kWh used (energy). ComEd in Chicago is a utility with a demand rate plan option.
That tends to be commercial rates since businesses can have larger spikes in consumption, so the "pipe" needs to be larger. Industrial rates are similar.
There are some like ComEd that you call out that can apply the model to residential rates, though my (now dated) experience is that they are rarer.
Knowing the average of 108 W wouldn't help with knowing your peak demand, as fridges vary significantly from off to startup to running, so knowing the average isn't useful in that situation either.
That strain does not seem to be reflected in the usage, which has been in a shallow decline since the 90s. Maybe they could consider using smart demand management, which is becoming popular with a lot of utilities to move usage away from peaks and into the quieter times.
Although this is totally informal, in a normal conversation if somebody gives me the wattage of a device, I assume they are peak power draw. For kWh/day, I assume they’ve accounted for some reasonable duty-factor.
Because that's not what they're interested in! Really what they care about is that the fridge is consuming about 9.36 MJ/day, because really kWh is just a convenience unit for joules. But since everyone gets charged in kWh that's the unit they use.
Possibly because it gives better intuition for the approximate cost per unit of time. Similar to how fuel consumption can be written as volume/length = area, but is still usually presented in the former way, since that shows the actual amount of resource being consumed.
I thought watt is a DC unit, so often avoided for AC measurements, since it is ambiguous which watt you are talking about, and the device is always consuming more or less than the average, and very rarely consuming that actual amount. Often the alternate unit is called VA, even though that too seems like a watt
Watts work fine for AC - multiply your RMS voltage by current. The RMS takes care of the fact that AC isn't steady like DC.
VA (takes power factor into account) is relevant for sizing transformers, breakers, wiring, etc but usually only affects your bill if you are a large industrial customer.
That is just what I said: that is the formula for VA, not P, even though both have the same dimensional units: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volt-ampere and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power#Apparent_power. And they'd be roughly the same for something like a toaster, but if you happen to be interested in, say, the billed power consumption of a 30 year old fridge with a motor
It is bit too derived unit. But on other hand it does make calculations pretty simple. Say 0.14 per kWh and then cost in month is simple multiplication 2.6300.14 . Or a year is 2.63650.14...
My gas bill each month lists the correction factor used for that month to compensate the meter reading to the volume consumed (and thus billed) based on the average weather.
Todays appliances are built, by design, to break fast these days. So whether old (operating costs) or new (foreshortened lifespan) your appliances cost you more.
There are still some repairable brands. GE'a basic appliances (and their budget subbrands like Hotpoint) are a standout with excellent availability of parts and service data. A hotpoint electric range can be fixed by any homeowner with a screwdriver.
As I recall GE is also one of the few/only brands that operates its own service business.
I will also point out that the way inflation has tended to work is that you can still buy high quality appliances and other consumer products (e.g., tailored clothes and built-to-last leather shoes), but when you do the inflation math you have to spend a lot to get the equivalent product from decades ago.
In other words, the same quality products generally still exist, the real issue is that a bunch of low price products that didn’t used to exist now do, and average people didn’t own as much stuff as they do now.
If you buy a $2500 Speed Queen or a $10,000 Sub-Zero you’re getting the kind of quality and repairability that used to exist in more appliances.
But when it comes to a $500 washing machine or dryer, when you adjust for inflation that product did not exist 40 years ago.
The other thing I’ve heard about this issue is that the mid-range consumer luxury type stuff is the segment to avoid: built cheaply but with a lot of features that fail and a high cost. E.g., Samsung refrigerators with touch screens on them. You’ll notice that most true luxury built-in brands don’t have a laundry list of gimmick features.
I bought more or less the same dryer as the one from 1997 that it replaced. There's cost reductions in some of the parts, but the overall design is more or less the same (for example, the timer is a cheaper design, there's no little door on the lint catcher, the adjustable feet are plastic instead of metal). I expect many parts are directly interchangeable.
I guess I'm not sure what the 1997 price was, so can't really make a comparison.
Fun story with the plastic feet, the delivery drivers either didn't know that they screwed into the dryer or pretended not to know. They left them barely inserted into the bottom and then put a shim under one of them to level it. I was standing there and kind of mumbled "can't you screw the others in" but dropped it and did it myself after they left.
Yes GE is owned by Haier, which worried me when I was researching fridges a couple years ago. But apparently most of the GE appliances are still manufactured in the U.S. and haven’t really changed much despite the change in ownership.
My GE fridge has been a disappointment. It is OK at its main function: cooling. However I've had to replace the main control board and the freezer defrost heater. The built-in water dispenser never really worked because the water line is routed too close to the freezer compartment and it freezes up. The ice maker is disconnected because its water line developed a leak and damaged my laminate floor before I noticed it. I don't think I'll be buying GE again.
The trick with fridges: Don't but ones with ice makers or water dispensers built in. There's a reason the rich install dedicated ice makers and filtered sinks.
> but when you do the inflation math you have to spend a lot to get the equivalent product from decades ago.
But this is usually deceptively explained as being because they are far more expensive to make, when it is really 1) because of economies of scale when they are made in smaller runs often by smaller companies, or 2) intentionally segmented at that price by the same companies that sell the disposable stuff as a high-margin luxury option.
If large companies were forced into a traditional quality standard, the cost increase wouldn't be 5x, it would be more like 1.5x. It might creep up after a while, as the runs became shorter because the products weren't built to fail anymore.
Was not immediately apparent in article but I did not read the whole thing. Beyond general repairability the other issue to me is the cost of labor. In Vietnam I can get near anything repaired because the cost of labor is so darn cheap. In America it makes no sense to be paying $100/hour usually minimum two hour repair plus the cost of the part.
I am ok with generally with having less ability to repair but I do wish more cities and companies and trade in programs for proper recycling.
Neither the article nor the linked sources even attempt to prove that modern appliances are less durable or having more issues than old appliances.
It seems to be just complaining about "computer circuit boards" in appliances, much the way people did about electronic ignition in cars, despite actually resulting in a huge increase in engine reliability because solid state has so very little to fail.
I mean, maybe people throw out a perfectly working toaster when it can't connect to Wi-Fi anymore, (or take their car to the dealer when their entertainment system acts-up) but that's not an actual reliability issue, IMHO.
Electricity is so cheap (8-9 cents per kWh), it doesn't even make sense to invest in saving it. I would any day choose a cheaper product over 20% more expensive one that uses 10% less power.
The article mentions ice building up in that old fridge, and this reminded me what I was told by a man who was fixing these things- that the condition of rubber seal and fridge not being leveled correctly can also lead to the ice buildup (if thermostat is not broken). He did not explain in deep technical details why, but said that when the fridge door is not sealing fully then the room air enters the fridge and due to different condensation point it causes moisture buildup at the coldest part. I am not sure how factual this was, since after hearing this I adjusted the fridge so the doors were always closing themselves thanks to gravity, and the ice still kept building up. I did not replace the seal though :)
The author is in Estonia. Appliances in the European Union have different energy standards and labels, and run on different voltages, so you don’t ever see Energy Star fridges there.
Estonia joined the EU in 2004, and I don’t know what the energy labelling on appliances was like before then.
I (well, my landlord) replaced a similarly old refrigerator last year. The thermostat was fine, it had developed a very slow gas leak and the charge had dropped enough that it was freezing rather than cooling.
It was using around 29kWh/month before the leak was noticeable, the new one uses 12kWh/month. The new one is slightly larger than the old. The old model was freezer-on-top style, the new one is a less efficient freezer below model.
The old fridges that didn't self-defrost are probably the most reliable. The only moving part is the compressor. No fans, no heaters, and fairly quiet. But the freezer compartment will ice up especially in humid climates and must be periodically defrosted which is a bit of a PITA.
have there been improvements to the insulation? given how good high-end coolers are now, i'd assume that there's been something with the non-mechanical parts that could have improved
Ultimately, not much. The polyurethane insulation of 1995 is pretty comparable with the polyurethane insulation of 2025.
There are better insulations out there, but they cost money and are harder to work with. For example, we could theoretically vacuum seal a fridge, but that'd require an airtight seal and likely a stainless steel structure around the fridge.
I think a lot of coolers used to have some parts like lid or even sides that were simply double-walled with an air gap and no real insulation. I remember old internet posts about people enhancing theirs by drilling into these spaces and injecting them with a minimally expanding foam from the hardware store.
Maybe somewhat better insulation and then I have noticed with combined units that there is more of it. That is usable volume is smaller due to larger amount of insulation.
Is that true though? Better coolants, inverters / variable speed / scroll /swing compressors, insulation and mfg, etc. maybe for residential it’s less impactful, but refrigeration in general has better efficiency than 30 years ago.
The Montreal protocol (1987) put us back into the dark ages with coolants for a while (both with CFC ban and later phase outs of HFCs). I suspect if you tested a refrigerator from 40 years ago they would give modern ones a run for their money...
It was obviously a worthwhile sacrifice for the ozone layer though.
New ones break quickly and then consume zero energy. So then you buy an even newer one without caring at all about the emissions to buy the new one and to get rid of the old one. And then feel good to be "saving the planet" because you have a super efficient fridge and repeat the cycle.
Since after 3 years you're beyond the break-even point due to energy use, the old refrigerator should be disposed of rather than given away.
By keeping it in service, it's making somebody poorer. Especially since the person receiving the free 30 year old power hungry refrigerator and keeping it for a decade is the least likely to afford a replacement.
Somebody already disadvantaged will eventually be stuck with structurally higher bills and find it harder to save due to this.
Those that's not your problem it's more a government policy problem.
Poor people can make their own decisions about whether to use an old fridge or not. They know much more about their own situation than you do. You are not well situated to make these sorts of decisions for them.
There's an old expression that I actually lived out: "Poor people have poor ways."
When I was living well below the poverty level, I used whatever resource that was available as long as it was legal. I was given a chest type freezer that was made somewhere in the early 60's, but was in good working order, since it was owned by a person in the HVAC field. It wasn't very efficient, but I needed the freezer space. (Since we didn't have air conditioning, I could afford the electric usage.) Most poor people make decisions based on whatever works, not if it's the best option, because of the lack of money.
But do they? Does the person taking on that broken refrigerator know that it has a flaw that makes it consume so much electricity that in 3 years the power use alone would cost more than buying a brand new refrigerator?
(ok, in this case they gave it to someone that needs a temporary 'fridge during renovations, so it's kind of a moot point, they aren't just giving it to "poor people")
Probably not any better than the last two LG fridges which both broke due to compressor issues, causing me to lose $1k of food each time.
In one case, during the high summer, I didn't notice one was slowly getting warmer. I had constant bowel problems, because I was eating rotten mayonnaise. This was compounded by the fact that I bought fancy spicy mayonnaise, which I'd never tasted before, which masked the rotten flavour.
So -- my lessons learned, never by LG horrible fridges again, and keep an analog thermometer, which I bought for $5, in the fridge.
(General FYI, LG has had more than one class action law suit because of their compressors, and, they even make it very hard to obtain replacements. Evil bastards.)
My point is, you should take care with any fridge, new or old.
I plan on putting some LoRaWAN temp sensors in my fridges/freezers to alert me if the temp goes out of spec for very long. (As soon as YoLink has their Local Hub available and functioning with Home Assistant.)
Good news for you, their local hub is available and I currently have fridge and freezer (and a few other sensors) hooked up to home assistant via it right now.
I doubt you'd be able to get a signal through from inside the fridge. I made a Home Assistant "food safety" dashboard and alerts. I found two challenges:
* Connecting to the outside world. I didn't go wireless because a fridge/freezer cavity is basically a Faraday cage, because I didn't want to deal with replacing batteries, and because high humidity + low temp = wet, sad microcontroller. And even a "flat" 4-conductor telephone cord disturbed the magnetic seal enough that there was a noticeable gap. I ended up buying a 4-contact, 1mm pitch, 200mm flat flexible cable to run across the seal. I separated the contacts with a utility knife, soldering them to other cables on both sides. I also heatshrinked the conductors individually and the whole junction together for strain relief. Then I superglued it into place. And 4 conductors is enough for ground, supply voltage, and either TX/RX or 1-Wire+unused.
* Getting a reading that matches what foods actually experience rather than the air temperature. The latter fluctuates a lot more when you open/close the door or depending on what the defrost/compressor is doing. I ended up buying waterproof 1-Wire temperature sensors (elecrow sells them for $1.20 each + reasonable shipping), 4 oz plastic bottles, cable glands, and propylene glycol (relatively safe antifreeze, though I wouldn't chug it). I drilled holes in the lids for the glands to run the sensors in, then closed the bottles up while immersed in the solution. Cheap DIY buffered temperature probe.
I currently measure buffered temperature, air temperature, and humidity, but really only the buffered temperature matters.
For the readings, I only really care about catching compressor failure within hours, as opposed to say, days, so for a freezer that's normally set to -18, I figure I'll just do something like "alert if temperature remains above -14 for >2 hours." Of my 4 fridges/freezers, only one has auto-defrost, so I guess I'll have to take that into account there.
There are loads of 'put them in the fridge/freezer' temp sensors out there, made just for this. I did buy lithium AA batteries (which work down to -40C even) for the sensor end.
My thoughts are, these things are special built, and only wake every few minutes or so to burst send. Batteries tend to last a couple of years (but with the lithium ones!), and I get beeeeps from the receiver if it dies.
(Not knocking your solution, it gives you more flexibility)
I saw a few that were wired with cords that seemed more intrusive than the telephone cord I tried, so I went my own way. And most of them didn't seem to be something I could connect to Home Assistant.
Well amazon has endless examples of wireless working fine. However, as I said, you get more flexibility with your own solution (like using Home Assistant)
My z-wave temperature sensor works inside my refrigerator. It's a stainless steel refrigerator with no window or icemaker in the door. Not sure how the signal gets out but it works.
Stainless is not a very good conductor. If it were aluminum or copper there’d be a problem but you can literally bury a bluetooth transmitter in a 16-gauge steel box with very little attenuation. I’ve done so at work.
Please. I've definitely smelled off food, and of course don't eat it. The mayo in question was some weird spicy stuff, and it didn't smell or taste bad.
You can borrow a watt meter at my local public library. I'm not saying the average person would have the knowledge to think of doing this, but it's not out of reach.
As another person has noted, this wasn't quite the scenario - they had renovations, but you know that now.
I had to renovate a kitchen a while ago and I got into the habit of living without a fridge or a freezer. It came as a surprise that this was possible, and the article is interesting because I now know how much money is saved. I can compare this to food wasted due to a lack of refrigeration, and, I am still seeing the advantages of no fridge. Such heresy!
It depends on what you eat, but I don't have time for most things that need to go in the fridge. If it isn't in the fridge at the supermarket then it doesn't need to be in the fridge at home is the general rule. Oddly I have lower food waste with no fridge, but there are annoyances such as not being able to buy a big bag of (say) carrots, and having to resupply twice a week. On the whole though, my food is a lot fresher than when I had a fridge, plus I have upped my nutrition game to not have this food morgue of things that 'want to kill me'. I joke, but there were a lot of ready meals, sticky puddings and much else that might as well been 'raw trans fats'. I went from this to a jute bag, which seems to keep most vegetables fresh enough for long enough.
What is also interesting about fridges is how quickly they turn into some cave of mold even if they are kept nice and clean. Turn that electricity off, take everything out, and, unless you keep the door open, some true horrors will be found in there a week later.
In the article this was not a like for like efficiency test by any stretch of the imagination. Over time it is the door seal that goes and, if that isn't tight then it will just be sucking moisture out of the air to make a huge ice block, hence compressor on the whole time.
The next problem is that some fridges have vents with fans in them, sometimes forward facing at the base. These get to collect lots of dust, hair and other debris, making them ineffective.
Despite these test methodology issues, in the real world people will be replacing an old fridge that has a dodgy seal with a new fridge that works as the manufacturer intended.
Regarding your point of the poor, do you have any idea how many people in the UK do not have a fridge, or access to one? Allegedly it is in the millions, which I find hard to believe, but have not dismissed out of hand. There are so many people living in sub-standard rented accommodation in a shoebox sized 'studio flat' (or worse). Proper housing is required before these people can get a fridge. The UK is allegedly a first world country, but with huge inequalities when it comes to property and income.
I suspect that in much of the world not having a fridge is no big deal, if you are living off the land rather than processed foods and processed animal products then why would no fridge be hardship?
It is amazing how many assumptions there are regarding fridges, the need for them and whether life is 'disadvantaged' without one. Until relatively recent times nobody had fridges yet we somehow survived, albeit with some mortality issues.
The comments are well done and I am impressed. I would add the maker of the new one, partly as a tribute to them as well as gathering feedback from others.
The fact that one compressors runs 24/7 might indicate it has failed to on 24/7 - also the ice block also says this? Thus a replacement thermostat might well reduce the KwHr used by the 24/7 operation. Looking up the model on youtube for thermostat repairs might help the new owner repair it and get a few more years, although an older less efficient unit, with a repaired thermostat it might not run 24/7 and use fewer KwHr?
Regardless of efficiency, it is very difficult to find a newer refrigerator whose compressor doesn't emit a very irritating high pitched whine almost continuously.
Personal pet level is that it’s so hard to get information on the noise level of appliances.
We’ve recently moved, and our new house’s crawl space has a Santa Fe dehumidifier in it that seems SO LOUD at night. I don’t think it’s broken - it’s just a compressor and fan with no engineering put into keeping them quiet. If I could get one that was as efficient and well built, but I knew would be quiet, I’d replace it in a heartbeat - but manufacturers don’t advertise noise levels.
Surely I can’t be the only one who’d pay substantially more for an appliance that was guaranteed to be quiet?
The newer compressors are smaller so they cost less, but are run faster to pump at the same rate. Many old hermetic compressors used a 4-pole 1500/1800RPM motor, then they became a 2-pole 3000/3600RPM, and the newest VFD/inverter motors can go even faster.
I would try plugging a simple induction motor into the refrigerator circuit to see if it also makes a weird noise. It's possible you have a problem with the wiring itself (loose neutral, etc.).
I've never had issues with HF noise out of a refrigerator. It's always been the opposite kind of noise that has been a problem.
Agree with the others here that this is absolutely not a fair comparison. Most likely the door of the old one was not sealing well, hence the continuous running and frost buildup. I have a late 30s Frigidaire that I restored a few years ago which has been taking around 200kWh/y (70W compressor, ~33% duty cycle.)
> Comparing the power consumption of a [broken] 30 year old refrigerator to a brand new one
Yeah, the title is misleading. The article says that one of the compressors on the old one was running constantly - if you applied the same failure mode to the new refrigerator, the difference would be significantly less.
Given modern minimalistic build standards, the modern compressor would probably overheat and fail if run continuously 24/7. I am reminded of the old simpsons bit where they make a tent in front of the refrigerator.
https://youtu.be/1t9BdMuzV64
I would expect a refrigerator that has EC motors running the compressor(s) and fan(s) to be around 2-2.5x as efficient as one with fixed speed motors, based on what I know about variable frequency drives and three-phase induction motors. For those, 80% speed uses 50% of the power, 63% uses 25% of the power. For an 1800 rpm motor that is 1440 rpm and 1134 rpm. VFDs work well for most applications with variable torque (fans and pumps), but applications requiring constant torque (saws, grinders, etc) are better served by fixed speed starters.
> variable frequency drives and three-phase induction motors. For those, 80% speed uses 50% of the power, 63% uses 25% of the power.
You’re presumably thinking of the “Affinity Laws”, which, according to Wikipedia (and plenty of other sources), “apply to pumps, fans, and hydraulic turbines. In these rotary implements, the affinity laws apply both to centrifugal and axial flows.”
This is, IMO, one of the worst kinds of science writing. Wikipedia, and plenty of other sources, make little mention of when the do and don’t apply or, relatedly, why they’re true and why they can’t always be true.
They generally apply to situations where a pump is pumping fluid through something like a filter or a long pipe where the pipe is a closed loop or at least the ends are at the same elevation (e.g. a swimming pool pump, except when pumping from a pool into a higher hot tub). So you have no actual work being done by moving fluid, and you can run the pump slower, and thus move less fluid per unit time, thus reducing friction in a manner that the pressure that the pump needs to overcome goes all the way to zero as the flow rate approaches zero.
But the affinity laws are not really anything fundamental about pumps, and they certainly do not override conservation of energy.
Now consider a refrigerator. The compressor is pumping refrigerant from an (approximately) fixed low pressure to a fixed high pressure. (The fluid goes back from high pressure to low pressure via a capillary tube or expansion valve or similar lossy device -- it gets its pressure increased in the gas phase and decreased in the liquid phase.) There's some friction, but after subtracting friction, the pressure is independent of flow rate, and thus the work done per unit flow is independent of flow rate, and the pump power scales linearly with flow as opposed to super-linearly as the affinity laws suggest.
Also, the compressor is a positive-displacement pump, and the affinity laws don't even pretend to apply to these.
(A well pump is another common system where the affinity laws will lead to nonsensical results. If you want to size a well pump properly, you need to know the height that you're raising the water, the output pressure you need, and the range of flows that you want. And then you look at the actual measured performance curves of the pumps (and their drives) that you are considering, and you pick something appropriate.)
All that being said, variable-speed fridges exist, and they're kind of nice in that they try to run continuously and quietly instead of alternating between full-power (and loud) and all the way off. And they are probably a bit more efficient because there's less friction and because the motors are likely to be more efficient three-phase designs instead of the not-actually-amazing single-phase motors you'll find in older fridges.
> variable-speed fridges exist, and they're kind of nice in that they try to run continuously and quietly instead of alternating between full-power (and loud) and all the way off.
Modern continuous variable speed compressor fridges drive me absolutely crazy. They sound like two ceramic plate rubbing together with some maddening flutter.
Some also add incredibly annoying high pitch whines. That seemingly nobody seems to notice but me. In the same vein as coils whine from power supplies and other modern electronic.
Old bang bang fridges are loud, on lower frequency, and with a sound that is more consistent and stable. Not varying one second to the next, which I find easier to ignore.
I have started looking at how reasonable it is to move the compressor of my expensive and low quality 2025 fridge across the wall into the garage (refrigerant capture and refill, brazing new lines etc).
VFDs need really good grounding. Make sure you have a solid earth ground or you can get arcing across the motor bearings. This makes a sound that’s often described as “fluting,” and I think that might be your problem. If it is, you need to fix that before your bearings are trashed and you have to replace the motor.
Fascinating, I will investigate.
The outlet are grounded with a thin non insulated copper wire secured to the nearest water copper pipe, itself also bounded to the iron gas pipe (this is 1950 electrical). I am not sure I can call this a solid earth ground.
Thank you for the info!
If your electrical service is also bonded to the gas and water pipes (it likely is), that grounding arrangement for the receptacle is fine.
It's not just modern electronics. I used to be able to know, the minute I walked in, if there were any CRT TVs on in someones house. Flyback coil whine was a constant presence.
> Some also add incredibly annoying high pitch whines. That seemingly nobody seems to notice but me.
That drove me crazy for about a week trying to figure out what the noise was coming from... Pinhole water pipe leak? Cat stuck in the flue? Once I realized what it was, I didn't mind it much. It is better than loud old compressors suddenly kicking on and burrr'ing away then stopping.
> I have started looking at how reasonable it is to move the compressor of my expensive and low quality 2025 fridge across the wall into the garage (refrigerant capture and refill, brazing new lines etc).
It would be worth looking into commercial refrigeration as well, you can get a refrigerator with a remote condenser and I’m sure you could find used equipment. Either way you’re going to have to run refrigerant piping and plumb in condensate drains.
Variable-compressor fridges will be more thermodynamically efficient, as the heat transfer happens more gradually, so temperature differences across the heat pump will be lower (e.g. because the condenser will have more time to gradually transfer heat to the room, it won't get as hot). And coefficient of performance for a heat pump is higher if the temperature difference is smaller. Another way to achieve this might be with a variable-displacement compressor (which is how modern car AC systems work, rather than cycling on/off).
Unlikely. The thermal timescales are long enough that the fridge turning on and off doesn't mean the temperatures vary wildly. That's why they can do it in the first place!
Central heating on the other hand... I'm definitely never buying a boiler without opentherm.
This is the kind of comment that makes HN special and precious. Thank you.
This reply is amazing, thank you! This gives me a much better understanding of the work done by a chilled water pump in a closed loop vs a refrigerant pump with an expansion valve in the loop and in which situations the affinity laws apply to.
I’m just a dumb electrical PM who knows enough to be dangerous, and I only know how things like heat exchangers, pumps, and fans work on a very basic level so this is illuminating.
Save us dang
It's still functional though, the point is comparing 'keep running the old tired one' vs 'replace with new', not 'how well were they made then vs now'.
I feel like a more appropriate - or at least a more interesting - comparison would be “fix the old one” vs “replace with new.” Replacing an old broken product with a new unbroken one is changing two variables, not one.
Now, if the author would like to break their New refrigerator and report back, I’ll take it as an interesting result.
Can you even fix the 30 year old one... that's still '95 when these things weren't very fixable.
But at the end of the day the question is what is the likelihood the old fridge will be in a semi-broken state.
Totally fine to choose as the author did, but for others who might face a similar choice: repairing a thermostat in a fridge is dramatically easier than fixing almost anything in a dishwasher. I did that with my fridge - cost <$20 for the part and maybe 30 minutes of work. Your (EU) kilometrage may vary.
I suspect the power savings would be much less dramatic with a fixed thermostat.
It takes a long time getting to know your dishwasher but my 2014 model was actually not that hard to debug and fix. Need to be able to source the parts of course. I was surprised how repairable it was. Will watch out for it when I need to buy another one.
Indeed, been there. Just getting the dishwasher out of its cubby hole is a major effort, and involves dealing with not just the wiring but the hoses too. And if it's an older house, chances are good that the dishwasher had to be crammed in with a certain amount of hacking, cussing, and persuasion.
The fridge rolls out into the room on its own wheels.
Many dishwashers are supposed to be wood-screwed into the surrounding cabinets! Recently installed one for a friend and was surprised to see that instruction.
Meanwhile, with the exception of ice makers/water dispensers (1/4 PEX), fridges don't have to deal with hoses for the most part. So much easier IME.
> Many dishwashers are supposed to be wood-screwed into the surrounding cabinets!
That's so they don't tip forward when a rack loaded with dishes is pulled out. There's a fair bit of forward leverage in that weight distribution.
A lot of fridges in Europe are integrated into the kitchen cabinets, similar to dishwashers.
So I'd say they face the same kind of issues.
This must be dependent on your country's customs, I suppose. I've taken out dishwashers quite a few times and it was actually fairly easy. No wheels, true, but cables and hoses were never much of a problem in my case.
Nah, dishwashers are pretty light too. With a muscle mass of 1% I usually just flip it over to work on it. This is just peak HN, PhDs still phased by something requiring an 8th grade level of education. In the US, the supply is usually a screw on, the drain a clamp and if the wiring isn’t already a quick connect just throw some Wagos on.
Amen. I put my dishwasher in myself so I get to curse myself for that hacking.
Worst was sourcing the parts though. Getting the thing out, effectively getting it up on blocks to run it and see the issue was hard work. Getting the specific totally non-standard o-ring size out of the manufacturer was impossible. In the end I resorted to siliconing but I just cannot dump something like that over a 5c part.
Unless the fridge is sitting on the subfloor/slab and a floor was built around the fridge, blocking it in.
I just replaced the drain pump and motherboard on my GE dishwasher and it was super easy. Everything was easy to access and all the major parts had a QR code on them making parts lookup idiot proof.
When the parts showed up they came with all the clamps and other replacement hardware that I didn’t even know I needed.
I've found cheap after-market thermostats to have short lifetimes... Original lasted 20 years... Replacement started misbehaving in just 2 years.
So now my policy is to retrofit all old refrigerators with digital STC-1000 thermostats. A bit more work to cut out some plastic, split the hot wire and tap into a neutral wire (easy enough to follow the bulb) but cheaper, super reliable, and gives very consistent and highly controllable results.
Two such upgraded refrigerators are still working without an issue several years later. Though both required replacing the relay (with a solid state relay/capacitor unit) at about the same time, and one after replacement of the evaporator fan motor due to noise issues.
I've found US dishwashers pretty easy to fix, but Korean and German ones can be a bit more of a pain, and these are the ones built for the US market. I've heard that European models often have water softeners built in.
Yeah I was wondering if there was perhaps some regional differences. The one time I did a DIY fix of my dishwasher I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was. They're largely very simple devices, and aside from a couple screws to keep them from tipping, they slide right out of the opening they're in.
> [...] German ones can be a bit more of a pain
I did replace my dishwasher a few years ago with a Bosch. Uh-oh!
Not sure about dishwasher but our Bosch washing machine was fixed with little real fuss other than needing to have torx screw-bits. I quite admired the engineering.
We too have a Bosch dishwasher so - like you - we'll see how that goes...
Looking at their designs, this seems to be the case with other white goods too; I suspect it's because US designs are relatively old and simple since they were among the first, while foreign designs are more highly space- and cost-optimised at the expense of repairability and possibly robustness.
Also: if you find ice forming in your fridge, or uneven cooling inside, it may be due to a clogged drain tube. This was the root cause of my fridge breaking: tube in the back clogged -> condensation backed up around the evaporator coils -> froze solid -> blocked circulation fan -> incorrect thermal readings, warm/frozen spots in fridge.
I had one with a fan inside it that died, to similar effect. I didn't even know it used a fan to recirculate the air, until it didn't.
Depends. My last fridge the thermostat went bad and it couldn’t be fixed because they embedded the entire thing into the foam. Terrible design. Was a whirlpool.
That's similar to what sent my last Samsung fridge to its next home. Samsung apparently had some problems with wire movement in the door hinge, so they changed the design and embedded the wires in glue/foam/whatever. So now if you have a problem with those wires, which happens because it's a hinge ... you get to replace the whole door at least. Turns out to be an expensive pain in the ass if the fridge is more than a few years old, it was more time- and cost-effective to get a new fridge at that point.
A 21 kWh/month it's 252 kwh/annum (I guess?), which is around energy label E in the new EU energy labels.
If you go for energy label A, some fridges have 101 kWh/annum, which is more than half less! I haven't seen many, and they are usually very tall, but hopefully we can see more and more in the future.
Since a fridge's compressor runs about 30% of the time, most of the energy savings of the new fridge are because of a new thermostat.
But the new fridge will not last thirty. Heck, he's lucky if it lasts ten. Five if he lives in an area prone to electrical surges.
The dramatic things with refrigerators is that in most countries people will install them in the kitchen for obvious practicality reasons, which is often also the hottest room of the house/appartment due to ovens, stoves and spending a significant amount of time there. If you think of it, it is bonkers that we put a device meant to keep stuff cold in what is a heated place in northern countries. Some hold houses and building used to have non heated dedicated rooms meant to keep food at a lower temperature naturally in winter but this has pretty much disappeared.
OTOH I live in a coastal city in south of Spain and every time I read a label that said food shouldn't be in a fridge but kept in a fresh and dry storage I ask myself where the eff should I store it there is no place like that unless I am running aircon 24/7 which I certainly won't do.
The ambient temperature differential between the kitchen and other rooms in a house is minimal on average. There’s nothing bonkers about putting the refrigerator in that space. Even a hypothetical 20F temperature rise during an hour long cooking session is basically negligible for the efficiency of a refrigerator that is cooling 24/7.
Putting the refrigerator in an unconditioned space wouldn’t be as big of a win as you think because every time you open the door to the unconditioned space you’re letting cold air into the house. Twice per refrigerator visit all day long adds up.
In the winter you actually benefit from having the refrigerator in your conditioned space because the waste heat goes toward heating your house. It would be lose-lose to put it outside of the house in a cold location.
I Suppose heating fuel is cheaper, or household heat pumps are more efficient, but all of the energy consumed by running the refrigerator becomes waste heat in the same room you are trying to heat. That seems superior to the refrigerator heating a room where the waste heat isn’t useful.
Where do you store your wine? (Only half kidding, but I am sure you have solutions like this in Spain)
well I don't have one, I rarely ever drink wine at home, but there are dedicated devices for that, I think they are called wine cabinets in english? They could be used to store other things indeed. I have never looked at the energy consumption of these things.
> kept in a fresh and dry storage I ask myself where the eff should I store it
Your mountain home. (I'd hazard a guess that many such products come from the interior versus humid coasts.)
The fridge box is fairly insulated. Temps in my home are consistent all over plus or minus a couple degrees. I think you've overstating the case a lot here. Even with the oven running it doesnt seem to affect the fridge too much. Heck in a lot of warmer climates people leave a spare fridge outside where its battling non-climate controlled air.
In the winter your fridge's waste heat is warming up your kitchen, so if anything, its a bit of a bonus those months.
The only thing I think we could do with fridges is put in a system that pulls cold air in during the winter but that's sawing holes into brick and yet another thing to worry about in regards to mold, critters, moisture, filters, fans, etc. Its just not worth the effort or cost.
Why talk about 2.6 kWh/day (power*time/time = energy/time = power) when there is perfectly fine unit for that, namely the watt?
2.6 kWh/day = 2.6 kWh/24h = 108 W, on average.
Electric bills aren't calculated by the Watt, you pay per kWh. The expected cost of running the fridge is the salient information.
0.108 x 168 hours/wk x 4.4 wks/month gives a good approximation for kwh/month. Demand over time gives consumption just fine.
A 75% drop is nice and much improved.
I've had this thought before, when seeing labels that talk about kWh/day. The answer is very simple: you pay per kWh. When people want to know power efficiency, what they really want to know is "how much will this cost me to run?". That answer is most easily expressed in kWh per unit time.
Also giving an averaged power drain would be misleading. If the device uses 2.4kW but only for half an hour per day, that's not a 50W device as far as cabling, fuses and other electrical considerations.
In the US, at least, there are some utilities that charge based on maximum kW (demand) and total kWh used (energy). ComEd in Chicago is a utility with a demand rate plan option.
That tends to be commercial rates since businesses can have larger spikes in consumption, so the "pipe" needs to be larger. Industrial rates are similar.
There are some like ComEd that you call out that can apply the model to residential rates, though my (now dated) experience is that they are rarer.
Knowing the average of 108 W wouldn't help with knowing your peak demand, as fridges vary significantly from off to startup to running, so knowing the average isn't useful in that situation either.
Sweden just mandated kW prices along with the kWh. I think because we are starting to see the extra strain on the grid with EVs.
That strain does not seem to be reflected in the usage, which has been in a shallow decline since the 90s. Maybe they could consider using smart demand management, which is becoming popular with a lot of utilities to move usage away from peaks and into the quieter times.
> when seeing labels that talk about kWh/day
That's at least kinda reasonable. I'm always amused when I see TV energy labels that state
xx kWh/1000h
Although this is totally informal, in a normal conversation if somebody gives me the wattage of a device, I assume they are peak power draw. For kWh/day, I assume they’ve accounted for some reasonable duty-factor.
Because that's not what they're interested in! Really what they care about is that the fridge is consuming about 9.36 MJ/day, because really kWh is just a convenience unit for joules. But since everyone gets charged in kWh that's the unit they use.
Possibly because it gives better intuition for the approximate cost per unit of time. Similar to how fuel consumption can be written as volume/length = area, but is still usually presented in the former way, since that shows the actual amount of resource being consumed.
I thought watt is a DC unit, so often avoided for AC measurements, since it is ambiguous which watt you are talking about, and the device is always consuming more or less than the average, and very rarely consuming that actual amount. Often the alternate unit is called VA, even though that too seems like a watt
Watts work fine for AC - multiply your RMS voltage by current. The RMS takes care of the fact that AC isn't steady like DC.
VA (takes power factor into account) is relevant for sizing transformers, breakers, wiring, etc but usually only affects your bill if you are a large industrial customer.
That is just what I said: that is the formula for VA, not P, even though both have the same dimensional units: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volt-ampere and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power#Apparent_power. And they'd be roughly the same for something like a toaster, but if you happen to be interested in, say, the billed power consumption of a 30 year old fridge with a motor
Because the most familiar anchor for scale is the monthly meter reading, which is in kWh.
It is bit too derived unit. But on other hand it does make calculations pretty simple. Say 0.14 per kWh and then cost in month is simple multiplication 2.6300.14 . Or a year is 2.63650.14...
Watts measure power, kWh measure energy - and they are a more convenient unit than J.
If you have natural gas connection, you can be charged for both kWh and GJ on the same bill!
Or your utility may use freedom units like Therms
Ccf is also common because it's the directly measured quantity by your gas provider and you don't need silly charts like https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec12_5.pdf
Seems odd to sell a gas by volume though... are these understood to be at a standardized pressure/density?
My gas bill each month lists the correction factor used for that month to compensate the meter reading to the volume consumed (and thus billed) based on the average weather.
I got a rated "A" for one year, this model (256 liter fridge + 122 liter freezer) :
https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/refrigeratingappli...
Rated for 113 kWh/year
I left a powermeter on it for one year and got 130 kWh.
It's amazing that the average power consumption is less than 15 Watt.
My new Bosch 2020 refrigerator broke down after 3 years of usage. Coolant leakage. Not repairable due to the foam direct injection.
Todays appliances are built, by design, to break fast these days. So whether old (operating costs) or new (foreshortened lifespan) your appliances cost you more.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...
(https://ghostarchive.org/archive/KGf2Z)
There are still some repairable brands. GE'a basic appliances (and their budget subbrands like Hotpoint) are a standout with excellent availability of parts and service data. A hotpoint electric range can be fixed by any homeowner with a screwdriver.
While we're on this topic, kudos to "Sears Parts Direct" for carrying a bewildering array of spare parts for those appliances.
repairclinic.com is another good one. Not always the cheapest but very DIY-oriented.
The problem though is one of diminished durability by intent rather than repairability. Not to mention rising cost-of-repair.
As I recall GE is also one of the few/only brands that operates its own service business.
I will also point out that the way inflation has tended to work is that you can still buy high quality appliances and other consumer products (e.g., tailored clothes and built-to-last leather shoes), but when you do the inflation math you have to spend a lot to get the equivalent product from decades ago.
In other words, the same quality products generally still exist, the real issue is that a bunch of low price products that didn’t used to exist now do, and average people didn’t own as much stuff as they do now.
If you buy a $2500 Speed Queen or a $10,000 Sub-Zero you’re getting the kind of quality and repairability that used to exist in more appliances.
But when it comes to a $500 washing machine or dryer, when you adjust for inflation that product did not exist 40 years ago.
The other thing I’ve heard about this issue is that the mid-range consumer luxury type stuff is the segment to avoid: built cheaply but with a lot of features that fail and a high cost. E.g., Samsung refrigerators with touch screens on them. You’ll notice that most true luxury built-in brands don’t have a laundry list of gimmick features.
I bought more or less the same dryer as the one from 1997 that it replaced. There's cost reductions in some of the parts, but the overall design is more or less the same (for example, the timer is a cheaper design, there's no little door on the lint catcher, the adjustable feet are plastic instead of metal). I expect many parts are directly interchangeable.
I guess I'm not sure what the 1997 price was, so can't really make a comparison.
Fun story with the plastic feet, the delivery drivers either didn't know that they screwed into the dryer or pretended not to know. They left them barely inserted into the bottom and then put a shim under one of them to level it. I was standing there and kind of mumbled "can't you screw the others in" but dropped it and did it myself after they left.
GE was bought by Haier (a Chinese company) about ten years ago. I have a bunch of them and so far they are all pretty good.
Yes GE is owned by Haier, which worried me when I was researching fridges a couple years ago. But apparently most of the GE appliances are still manufactured in the U.S. and haven’t really changed much despite the change in ownership.
My GE fridge has been a disappointment. It is OK at its main function: cooling. However I've had to replace the main control board and the freezer defrost heater. The built-in water dispenser never really worked because the water line is routed too close to the freezer compartment and it freezes up. The ice maker is disconnected because its water line developed a leak and damaged my laminate floor before I noticed it. I don't think I'll be buying GE again.
The trick with fridges: Don't but ones with ice makers or water dispensers built in. There's a reason the rich install dedicated ice makers and filtered sinks.
> but when you do the inflation math you have to spend a lot to get the equivalent product from decades ago.
But this is usually deceptively explained as being because they are far more expensive to make, when it is really 1) because of economies of scale when they are made in smaller runs often by smaller companies, or 2) intentionally segmented at that price by the same companies that sell the disposable stuff as a high-margin luxury option.
If large companies were forced into a traditional quality standard, the cost increase wouldn't be 5x, it would be more like 1.5x. It might creep up after a while, as the runs became shorter because the products weren't built to fail anymore.
Was not immediately apparent in article but I did not read the whole thing. Beyond general repairability the other issue to me is the cost of labor. In Vietnam I can get near anything repaired because the cost of labor is so darn cheap. In America it makes no sense to be paying $100/hour usually minimum two hour repair plus the cost of the part.
I am ok with generally with having less ability to repair but I do wish more cities and companies and trade in programs for proper recycling.
That article does not seem to support in any way the statement that appliances are intentionally designed for short lifespans.
Neither the article nor the linked sources even attempt to prove that modern appliances are less durable or having more issues than old appliances.
It seems to be just complaining about "computer circuit boards" in appliances, much the way people did about electronic ignition in cars, despite actually resulting in a huge increase in engine reliability because solid state has so very little to fail.
I mean, maybe people throw out a perfectly working toaster when it can't connect to Wi-Fi anymore, (or take their car to the dealer when their entertainment system acts-up) but that's not an actual reliability issue, IMHO.
Electricity is so cheap (8-9 cents per kWh), it doesn't even make sense to invest in saving it. I would any day choose a cheaper product over 20% more expensive one that uses 10% less power.
My delivered cost of electricity went up about 50% per kWh in the last few months and is therefore 3x what you mention and likely only going higher.
[AI driven] data center power consumption is real and as of right now, it seems like other consumers are subsidizing it.
Electricity prices varies a LOT depending where in the world you are: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...
And if you didn't live in a place where it's cheap?
The article mentions ice building up in that old fridge, and this reminded me what I was told by a man who was fixing these things- that the condition of rubber seal and fridge not being leveled correctly can also lead to the ice buildup (if thermostat is not broken). He did not explain in deep technical details why, but said that when the fridge door is not sealing fully then the room air enters the fridge and due to different condensation point it causes moisture buildup at the coldest part. I am not sure how factual this was, since after hearing this I adjusted the fridge so the doors were always closing themselves thanks to gravity, and the ice still kept building up. I did not replace the seal though :)
Energy Star appliances started to show up circa 1995 so there may have been comparably efficient fridges back then.
The author is in Estonia. Appliances in the European Union have different energy standards and labels, and run on different voltages, so you don’t ever see Energy Star fridges there.
Estonia joined the EU in 2004, and I don’t know what the energy labelling on appliances was like before then.
I (well, my landlord) replaced a similarly old refrigerator last year. The thermostat was fine, it had developed a very slow gas leak and the charge had dropped enough that it was freezing rather than cooling.
It was using around 29kWh/month before the leak was noticeable, the new one uses 12kWh/month. The new one is slightly larger than the old. The old model was freezer-on-top style, the new one is a less efficient freezer below model.
Hopefully the new one lasts as long as the old!
I really want to know the power usage of the old fridge after it was fixed. :(
My assumption, probably pretty close to the new fridge.
Very little has changed in fridge tech in 30 years besides them getting cheaper and breaking easier.
The old fridges that didn't self-defrost are probably the most reliable. The only moving part is the compressor. No fans, no heaters, and fairly quiet. But the freezer compartment will ice up especially in humid climates and must be periodically defrosted which is a bit of a PITA.
have there been improvements to the insulation? given how good high-end coolers are now, i'd assume that there's been something with the non-mechanical parts that could have improved
Ultimately, not much. The polyurethane insulation of 1995 is pretty comparable with the polyurethane insulation of 2025.
There are better insulations out there, but they cost money and are harder to work with. For example, we could theoretically vacuum seal a fridge, but that'd require an airtight seal and likely a stainless steel structure around the fridge.
I think a lot of coolers used to have some parts like lid or even sides that were simply double-walled with an air gap and no real insulation. I remember old internet posts about people enhancing theirs by drilling into these spaces and injecting them with a minimally expanding foam from the hardware store.
Maybe somewhat better insulation and then I have noticed with combined units that there is more of it. That is usable volume is smaller due to larger amount of insulation.
For a fair comparison, they should measure a modern fridge when it misbehaving and running its WiFi and GPU constantly
Is that true though? Better coolants, inverters / variable speed / scroll /swing compressors, insulation and mfg, etc. maybe for residential it’s less impactful, but refrigeration in general has better efficiency than 30 years ago.
> Better coolants
The Montreal protocol (1987) put us back into the dark ages with coolants for a while (both with CFC ban and later phase outs of HFCs). I suspect if you tested a refrigerator from 40 years ago they would give modern ones a run for their money...
It was obviously a worthwhile sacrifice for the ozone layer though.
New ones break quickly and then consume zero energy. So then you buy an even newer one without caring at all about the emissions to buy the new one and to get rid of the old one. And then feel good to be "saving the planet" because you have a super efficient fridge and repeat the cycle.
So can we project from the authors data that, under normal operation, both bridges roughly consume the same amount of power?
Anybody know how the author collected the energy consumption data?
From a link in TFA: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2024/05/02/smartplugs/
Since after 3 years you're beyond the break-even point due to energy use, the old refrigerator should be disposed of rather than given away.
By keeping it in service, it's making somebody poorer. Especially since the person receiving the free 30 year old power hungry refrigerator and keeping it for a decade is the least likely to afford a replacement.
Somebody already disadvantaged will eventually be stuck with structurally higher bills and find it harder to save due to this.
Those that's not your problem it's more a government policy problem.
Poor people can make their own decisions about whether to use an old fridge or not. They know much more about their own situation than you do. You are not well situated to make these sorts of decisions for them.
There's an old expression that I actually lived out: "Poor people have poor ways."
When I was living well below the poverty level, I used whatever resource that was available as long as it was legal. I was given a chest type freezer that was made somewhere in the early 60's, but was in good working order, since it was owned by a person in the HVAC field. It wasn't very efficient, but I needed the freezer space. (Since we didn't have air conditioning, I could afford the electric usage.) Most poor people make decisions based on whatever works, not if it's the best option, because of the lack of money.
When you have no options whatever works is the best choice.
But do they? Does the person taking on that broken refrigerator know that it has a flaw that makes it consume so much electricity that in 3 years the power use alone would cost more than buying a brand new refrigerator?
(ok, in this case they gave it to someone that needs a temporary 'fridge during renovations, so it's kind of a moot point, they aren't just giving it to "poor people")
Probably not any better than the last two LG fridges which both broke due to compressor issues, causing me to lose $1k of food each time.
In one case, during the high summer, I didn't notice one was slowly getting warmer. I had constant bowel problems, because I was eating rotten mayonnaise. This was compounded by the fact that I bought fancy spicy mayonnaise, which I'd never tasted before, which masked the rotten flavour.
So -- my lessons learned, never by LG horrible fridges again, and keep an analog thermometer, which I bought for $5, in the fridge.
(General FYI, LG has had more than one class action law suit because of their compressors, and, they even make it very hard to obtain replacements. Evil bastards.)
My point is, you should take care with any fridge, new or old.
(edit: some clarity on mayo)
> $1k of food each time
What, is it chock full of exclusively ribeye steaks and smoked salmon?
That feels like a crazy number. I keep a lot of nice vacuum-sealed protein in my freezer but even then I'd say the value is $300 max.
How do you get to $1K?
I plan on putting some LoRaWAN temp sensors in my fridges/freezers to alert me if the temp goes out of spec for very long. (As soon as YoLink has their Local Hub available and functioning with Home Assistant.)
Good news for you, their local hub is available and I currently have fridge and freezer (and a few other sensors) hooked up to home assistant via it right now.
I doubt you'd be able to get a signal through from inside the fridge. I made a Home Assistant "food safety" dashboard and alerts. I found two challenges:
* Connecting to the outside world. I didn't go wireless because a fridge/freezer cavity is basically a Faraday cage, because I didn't want to deal with replacing batteries, and because high humidity + low temp = wet, sad microcontroller. And even a "flat" 4-conductor telephone cord disturbed the magnetic seal enough that there was a noticeable gap. I ended up buying a 4-contact, 1mm pitch, 200mm flat flexible cable to run across the seal. I separated the contacts with a utility knife, soldering them to other cables on both sides. I also heatshrinked the conductors individually and the whole junction together for strain relief. Then I superglued it into place. And 4 conductors is enough for ground, supply voltage, and either TX/RX or 1-Wire+unused.
* Getting a reading that matches what foods actually experience rather than the air temperature. The latter fluctuates a lot more when you open/close the door or depending on what the defrost/compressor is doing. I ended up buying waterproof 1-Wire temperature sensors (elecrow sells them for $1.20 each + reasonable shipping), 4 oz plastic bottles, cable glands, and propylene glycol (relatively safe antifreeze, though I wouldn't chug it). I drilled holes in the lids for the glands to run the sensors in, then closed the bottles up while immersed in the solution. Cheap DIY buffered temperature probe.
I currently measure buffered temperature, air temperature, and humidity, but really only the buffered temperature matters.
I haven't tried yet, but YoLink specifically markets their LoRaWAN sensors as working in fridges: https://shop.yosmart.com/collections/smart-fridge
For the readings, I only really care about catching compressor failure within hours, as opposed to say, days, so for a freezer that's normally set to -18, I figure I'll just do something like "alert if temperature remains above -14 for >2 hours." Of my 4 fridges/freezers, only one has auto-defrost, so I guess I'll have to take that into account there.
There are loads of 'put them in the fridge/freezer' temp sensors out there, made just for this. I did buy lithium AA batteries (which work down to -40C even) for the sensor end.
My thoughts are, these things are special built, and only wake every few minutes or so to burst send. Batteries tend to last a couple of years (but with the lithium ones!), and I get beeeeps from the receiver if it dies.
(Not knocking your solution, it gives you more flexibility)
I saw a few that were wired with cords that seemed more intrusive than the telephone cord I tried, so I went my own way. And most of them didn't seem to be something I could connect to Home Assistant.
Well amazon has endless examples of wireless working fine. However, as I said, you get more flexibility with your own solution (like using Home Assistant)
My z-wave temperature sensor works inside my refrigerator. It's a stainless steel refrigerator with no window or icemaker in the door. Not sure how the signal gets out but it works.
Stainless is not a very good conductor. If it were aluminum or copper there’d be a problem but you can literally bury a bluetooth transmitter in a 16-gauge steel box with very little attenuation. I’ve done so at work.
I have remote gauges with alarms in my freezers, but I'm in my fridge every day, and nothing beats a simple analog gauge.
In the freezers I also employ either the "freeze some ice cubes and put them in a baggy" or "freeze a small jar and put a coin on top" methods.
If you see the ice cubes have melted and refroze, then trouble. If the coin is not on the top of the jar -- same thing. Fail proof methods.
> So -- my lessons learned, never by LG horrible fridges again
You'd need to be careful because many other manufacturers are using LG made compressors in their products.
LG and Samsung are the two that I think everyone should stay away from for major appliances.
GE and it's spinoff brands tend to do better.
You need to smell your food before you eat it. Trust your senses.
Please. I've definitely smelled off food, and of course don't eat it. The mayo in question was some weird spicy stuff, and it didn't smell or taste bad.
Note:
https://www.sciencealert.com/sniff-tests-wont-save-you-from-...
You cannot smell or taste all forms of bad food. At all.
You can borrow a watt meter at my local public library. I'm not saying the average person would have the knowledge to think of doing this, but it's not out of reach.
From the article:
> as a stopgap until they get further with renovation work
I assume they know what they are getting into.
It would be interesting to hear your comparison to counterarguments to this. Can you explain why these arguments are more important?
As another person has noted, this wasn't quite the scenario - they had renovations, but you know that now.
I had to renovate a kitchen a while ago and I got into the habit of living without a fridge or a freezer. It came as a surprise that this was possible, and the article is interesting because I now know how much money is saved. I can compare this to food wasted due to a lack of refrigeration, and, I am still seeing the advantages of no fridge. Such heresy!
It depends on what you eat, but I don't have time for most things that need to go in the fridge. If it isn't in the fridge at the supermarket then it doesn't need to be in the fridge at home is the general rule. Oddly I have lower food waste with no fridge, but there are annoyances such as not being able to buy a big bag of (say) carrots, and having to resupply twice a week. On the whole though, my food is a lot fresher than when I had a fridge, plus I have upped my nutrition game to not have this food morgue of things that 'want to kill me'. I joke, but there were a lot of ready meals, sticky puddings and much else that might as well been 'raw trans fats'. I went from this to a jute bag, which seems to keep most vegetables fresh enough for long enough.
What is also interesting about fridges is how quickly they turn into some cave of mold even if they are kept nice and clean. Turn that electricity off, take everything out, and, unless you keep the door open, some true horrors will be found in there a week later.
In the article this was not a like for like efficiency test by any stretch of the imagination. Over time it is the door seal that goes and, if that isn't tight then it will just be sucking moisture out of the air to make a huge ice block, hence compressor on the whole time.
The next problem is that some fridges have vents with fans in them, sometimes forward facing at the base. These get to collect lots of dust, hair and other debris, making them ineffective.
Despite these test methodology issues, in the real world people will be replacing an old fridge that has a dodgy seal with a new fridge that works as the manufacturer intended.
Regarding your point of the poor, do you have any idea how many people in the UK do not have a fridge, or access to one? Allegedly it is in the millions, which I find hard to believe, but have not dismissed out of hand. There are so many people living in sub-standard rented accommodation in a shoebox sized 'studio flat' (or worse). Proper housing is required before these people can get a fridge. The UK is allegedly a first world country, but with huge inequalities when it comes to property and income.
I suspect that in much of the world not having a fridge is no big deal, if you are living off the land rather than processed foods and processed animal products then why would no fridge be hardship?
It is amazing how many assumptions there are regarding fridges, the need for them and whether life is 'disadvantaged' without one. Until relatively recent times nobody had fridges yet we somehow survived, albeit with some mortality issues.
The comments are well done and I am impressed. I would add the maker of the new one, partly as a tribute to them as well as gathering feedback from others. The fact that one compressors runs 24/7 might indicate it has failed to on 24/7 - also the ice block also says this? Thus a replacement thermostat might well reduce the KwHr used by the 24/7 operation. Looking up the model on youtube for thermostat repairs might help the new owner repair it and get a few more years, although an older less efficient unit, with a repaired thermostat it might not run 24/7 and use fewer KwHr?
Regardless of efficiency, it is very difficult to find a newer refrigerator whose compressor doesn't emit a very irritating high pitched whine almost continuously.
Personal pet level is that it’s so hard to get information on the noise level of appliances.
We’ve recently moved, and our new house’s crawl space has a Santa Fe dehumidifier in it that seems SO LOUD at night. I don’t think it’s broken - it’s just a compressor and fan with no engineering put into keeping them quiet. If I could get one that was as efficient and well built, but I knew would be quiet, I’d replace it in a heartbeat - but manufacturers don’t advertise noise levels.
Surely I can’t be the only one who’d pay substantially more for an appliance that was guaranteed to be quiet?
>it’s so hard to get information on the noise level of appliances
It's super easy if you live in the European Union, thanks to the Energy Label [1] which is mandatory on every appliance.
[1] https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/ecodesign-and...
The newer compressors are smaller so they cost less, but are run faster to pump at the same rate. Many old hermetic compressors used a 4-pole 1500/1800RPM motor, then they became a 2-pole 3000/3600RPM, and the newest VFD/inverter motors can go even faster.
I would try plugging a simple induction motor into the refrigerator circuit to see if it also makes a weird noise. It's possible you have a problem with the wiring itself (loose neutral, etc.).
I've never had issues with HF noise out of a refrigerator. It's always been the opposite kind of noise that has been a problem.
My Miele hums with so low frequency that it sounds like a truck is passing by.