On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Clarke Olsen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:colsen@fairpoint.net" target="_blank">colsen@fairpoint.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word">The culprit may be frost free. This involves heaters to melt frost inside the fridge.<div>And, they have gotten bigger.</div><div>And the freezer section is colder. And bigger.</div><div>
And don't get me started on the ice makers.</div></div></blockquote><div><br>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. <br><br>
My favorite example of this particular foolishness <span class="il">is the early seventies fridge with four</span> (<span class="il">4</span>) different <span class="il">heaters</span>. Not
<span class="il">four</span> units performing the same function; no, <span class="il">four</span> <span class="il">heaters</span> all serving
different functions inside the <span class="il">fridge</span>. (1) anti sweat heater around the door; (2) defrost <span class="il">heater</span> in freezer compartment; (3) <span class="il">butter</span> compartment warmer in door; (<span class="il">4</span>) my favorite: a <span class="il">heater</span> to keep the meat from freezing. In this particular <span class="il">fridge</span> the designers decided not to put the special meat compartment at the bottom of the <span class="il">fridge</span>
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 <span class="il">fridge</span> temps, they put a special <span class="il">heater</span> in the portion of the freezer intended for keeping meat.<br>
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