[Greenbuilding] Re-fridgidasion

[Kathy Cochran]

That's a great thing to do with the Butter dish  -  unless the pantry is on
the west side of the house and it is 105 degrees outside.  (And trying not
to turn on the air conditioner..)

 

Cheers,

Kathy Cochran

 

From: greenbuilding-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org
[mailto:greenbuilding-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Clarke
Olsen
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 2:23 PM
To: Green Building
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] Re-fridgidasion

 

It's true! A repressed memory: I too once had a fridge with a heater in the
butta compartment! 

At the time. I found it hard to believe, but there it was. Now I leave the
butter dish in the pantry.

Clarke Olsen
clarkeolsendesign.com



 

On Jul 22, 2012, at 4:56 PM, Reuben Deumling 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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