The principal of the kitchen refrigerator is to take the heat out of the chamber to the grille on the back of the box, which is why it is quite warm in the back. For much of the year in most of the country, the outside temperature is as cold or colder than the inside of the refrigerator, but the refrigeration energy lost is because the heat-transfer grille is INSIDE the house. Were building standards reconsidered that the refrigerator grille be exposed to the outside temperature, the energy efficiency of refrigeration in american houses would improve radically.
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
One problem: during summer a well insulated house will be warmer outside than inside the house, so your cooling element will need to work harder than it currently does. I would propose a compromise situation: a normal fridge with a vent to the outside. When it's cooler outside than in the fridge, then just suck some of the outside air into the fridge Implementing this idea (requiring an outside thermostat, an in-fridge thermostat, puller fan, insulated pipes, vent cover and filter of some sort) wouldn't be to hard, but would reduce the number of ways you could design your kitchen. During winter I'd guess your fridge would hardly work at all. During summer it would work at the same rate as it does currently.
Clearly putting the grille to the outside air supply is more complex in terms of integration with the house... but my thinking was to have an area of the outer house skin where air vents come in on the bottom and top, yet it is beneath the outer building skin. Even in the summer, dumping the heat from inside the fridge box, is best done to the outside of the house, as otherwise, one is heating the kitchen... and then likely cooling the kitchen using more energy.
I was thinking this could be achieved by a cooling-system extension kit supplied to connect a second "outside" grille to an existing fridge (as certainly this is the innovation in terms of changing the white goods themselves).. and easy way to move the grille, or to plug in to a house-integrated existing grille... this might be some sort of interconnection standard perhaps.
Given places where the temperature is actually below the freezer temperature, no need for a compressor in those times rather an outside vent fan can cool the fridge with the compressor shutting down. All of these would easily cut a household electricity bill in half due to the intense load of existing refrigeration as a ratio of household energy burn.
Re: All of these would easily cut a household electricity bill in half due
Fridges are very efficient as it is - comparable to a lightbulb I think. I doubt you're gonna cut your household electricity bill by anything more than a tiny fraction!
Interesting ideas, but they all talk about reducing electricity by improving the in which the waste heat is disapated. I am currently working on a method to collect that heat and reuse it. Hopefully, the method will draw heat away from the cooling element thereby reducing the amount of work the compressor has to do thereby also reducing the electrical consumption in two areas.
Refrigerators use 500-1,000 kwh/year (according to the DOE),see their page - a hefty light bulb, but still only $50-$100per year, half of the electricity bill of few of us.
To put the grille outside requires pumping the coolant throughlonger runs of tubing, which burdens the pump and exposesthe tubing to careless feet, etc. And external grillesrequire heaters in cold climates to keep the coolant fromfreezing.
Ideally we would have an airlock hole in our houses in whichwe would install the refrigerator in warm weather: coilsoutside, door inside. In cold weather we would close theairlock and bring the refrigerator indoors.
Note that the refrigerator's waste heat increases the loadon the air conditioner, if you have one of those.
Did you spend any time researching refrigeration? Guess not. Start <a href="http://home.howstuffworks.com/refrigerator.htm> here</a href>, then come back and let us know why not.
Air ducts would be easier, and more enviromentally friendly, to a point, in that relocating active refrigration componentsrequires a licensed refrigeration technician, the air ducting does not, and can usually be done by the home owner.
the winter venting idea would be great in supermarkets-with the wasteful open-front dairy section fridge, walk-in restaraunt fridges...more chill for the suck than in a domestic fridge.
I have an idea --- we could store the cold from the winter to cool our food in the summer months. It would be easy implement, just cut the ice off the lakes in the winter and store it through the summer. People could even deliver it to our houses. :)
Many of the older houses in Finland included a closet in the kitchen with a vent to the outside so that in winter it doubled as a refrigerator. As refrigerators became common this closet disappeared.
During the heating months of Fall, Winter, and Spring, the refrigerator augments the house heating basically a resistive load. The motor runs and contributes as a heat source. No worse than the resistive heating elements of homes with electric heat.
During the summer months, it is an extra load on air conditioning. In that case, a split unit would work better. Like the air conditioner for central HVAC where the motor and condenser are outside while the evaporator (A-frame) are in the air handling unit in the house. Two tubes connect the two systems. One high pressure hot liquid and the other low pressure cold vapor. But during the winter months part of your system would be outside and you would lose the benefit of the heat produced by those components.
Which is worse, losing heat during the winter months, or adding a heat source to your air conditioner in the summer?
Ideally you would have to use 2 different systems.
I've always wanted a walk-in refrigerator and a walk-in freezer. Perhaps the powered vents mentioned earlier would be a good idea and have a split unit refrigeration system pulling down the freezer with 3 feet of insulation all around instead of the 2" found in the common refrigerator.