More Than Living

Will a new fridge-​​freezer save electricity, money?

So, a quick flick through my past posts reveals that, accord­ing to me, roofs are rub­bish, rain is rub­bish, fest­ivals are rub­bish, digital cam­eras are rub­bish, mobile phones are rub­bish, broad­band is rub­bish, cars are rub­bish and even rub­bish is rub­bish.

In short, modern life is rub­bish, except when it comes to fridges. Fridges are ace.

I won’t bore you again with the trials of living without one for a month, but my energy-​​saving chal­lenge was made easier by the fact that the old fridge broke at the start. I’d had half a mind to replace it, though, ever since I hooked it up to one of our power meters and dis­covered that it was using an incred­ible 15 kilowatt-​​hours (kWh) of elec­tri­city each week: enough to run my kettle for more than seven hours.

That had never seemed right to me, and I wanted to see whether a new replace­ment would really be that much better, or whether makers’ energy-​​saving claims are all just hot air.

Before I could find out, the old item had to be car­ried down the three flights of stairs from my flat, and a newer, unin­ten­tion­ally bigger ver­sion man­handled back up. This required the street-​​level removal of all of the replacement’s pack­aging, the sign­ing of a damage dis­claimer, and an almost super­hu­man effort not to upbraid the deliv­ery man for his insist­ence that it wasn’t going to fit until it already had.

If the first thing I learned from my new fridge-​​freezer was that it is chief among the things you don’t want to carry into a third-​​floor flat, the second was that modern examples are very, very good. After a quick wipe down, I hooked it up to the energy meter and set about load­ing it up with all the things I’d missed so much in my fridge­less month. Chiefly beer.

Fridge over troubled water

After the first day – much of which would have been spent work­ing hard to get everything down to tem­per­at­ure – it had used 1.45kWh, which seemed a prom­ising start. And des­pite extra demands from freez­ing bucket-​​loads of ice cubes, and left-​​over chilli and pasta sauces, at the end of the first week the meter was show­ing just 6.34kWh – less than half the elec­tri­city my old fridge would have used in the same time.

In the second week it only got through 5.05kWh, while in week three con­sump­tion was down to just 4.89kWh – less than a third that of my old fridge.

I’m impressed, frankly. New Fridge is bigger, colder and better than the old one, and yet it uses just a third of the power: It’s likely to save me more than ?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​11-​​05 05:22:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Business, Electricity, Energy, Energy conservation, Kilowatt hour, Refrigerator, Temperature, Utilities
Posted in Energy | View Comments