[Greenbuilding] Re-fridgeration

[Reuben Deumling]

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
fridgetemps, they put a special
heater in the portion of the freezer intended for keeping meat.
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