[Greenbuilding] Re-fridgeration

[Steven Tjiang]

I don't think there was a concerted effort to create all those uses.  There
was a concerted effort to generate and distribute alot of cheap electricity
and the market took care of the rest.  We just need to make energy
expensive again and conservation will happen.  Alas, there is no political
will to do that.

---- Steve (KZ6LSD)


On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Reuben Deumling <9watts at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Clarke Olsen <colsen at fairpoint.net>wrote:
>
>> The culprit may be frost free. This involves heaters to melt frost inside
>> the fridge.
>> And, they have gotten bigger.
>> And the freezer section is colder. And bigger.
>> And don't get me started on the ice makers.
>>
>
> Nope. Though the frost free function did consume more electricity than the
> manual defrost that preceded it, it is not the chief culprit. The culprit
> are the peculiar Cold War flights of fancy that had US opinion makers in
> the sixties measuring our ideological superiority by the number of kWh we
> consumed per capita in the US. The fact that we we then (1962) consumed 8x
> more than the Soviets was not good enough, because the gap was shrinking.
> The captains of industry decided they could help. So besides all electric
> houses (so-called Medallion Homes, very similar in concept to today's
> Energy Star Homes) we got refrigerators which compared to the previous
> models had most of the insulation taken out, the wall thickness shrunk,
> cheap compressors in place of the heavy copper monsters, and lots of
> heaters distributed throughout the interior.
>
> My favorite example of this particular foolishness is the early seventies
> fridge with four (4) different heaters. Not four units performing the
> same function; no, four heaters all serving different functions inside
> the fridge.  (1) anti sweat heater around the door; (2) defrost heater in
> freezer compartment; (3) butter compartment warmer in door; (4) my
> favorite: a heater to keep the meat from freezing. In this particular
> fridge the designers decided not to put the special meat compartment at
> the bottom of the fridge where the cold might be expected to collect (so
> to speak), but in the freezer. But of course, the freezer is much too cold
> for the temperature at which we are led to believe meat we don't want to
> freeze should be kept. So to achieve these slightly colder than regular
> fridge temps, they put a special heater in the portion of the freezer
> intended for keeping meat.
>
>
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