Green Fridge Invention Uses Almost No Electricity



Nearly every household has a fridge that completely wastes at least 30 kwh of energy every month.

Most of that energy is wasted every time you open the door. Cold air is heavier (warm air rises, remember?) so it falls out onto the floor every time you open your fridge, and warm air from outside rises to fill the space it left. But with a top opening fridge; even if you leave the door wide open, gravity effortlessly keeps the heavy cold air down, inside the fridge.

Using this principle, a clever Australian inventor, Tom Chalko has converted a deep freeze into an incredibly efficient refrigerator.

He chose a freezer because they are top opening. The only difference between a freezer and a fridge is the temperature maintained inside: freezers are colder.

Freezers maintain freezing temperatures, while fridges operate somewhere between 0 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But, if converted to a fridge, it only has to run for a minute or two every hour to maintain normal fridge temperatures. So turning a freezer into a fridge just meant installing a simple external thermostat to cut the power off when it reaches the temperature that Tom set.

(Carried away with his energy reduction; he also took out the 15 watt interior light bulb, but he will reconsider this, if he ever finds some reason “for opening my fridge in the dark.”)

His home-made fridge uses much energy in 24 hours as a 100 Watt light bulb gets through in just an hour.

Not only is it energy efficient; but it’s absolutely silent too. The thing is only running for a minute or two every hour. At all other times it is perfectly quiet and consumes no power whatsoever.

I wonder why no company has thought of this easy way to cut energy use in fridges?

All you clever designers out there; leave your thoughts on how to make a top-open fridge easy to get stuff in and out of. You just need a way for drawers to slide up, so you can access the depths without leaning down into a huge box. Devise your system so it needs no electricity, of course.

Via Build It Solar

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