How to Make Your Own High Efficiency Refrigerator

Using high efficiency technology and making a few straightforward lifestyle changes can have a large impact on your daily power use and make living off the grid much more feasible. One of the technological improvements I have made that I am most happy with is my home modified high efficiency refrigerator. This refrigerator has been my only refrigerator for 4 years and has operated flawlessly with very low power consumption. In this article, I will outline my reasons for the change and justify how to make the conversion so you can try it out yourself.

My motivation to experiment with a new refrigeration strategy came from my sense with my old refrigerator. It was a fairly tasteless style of stand up refrigerator with a freezer section on the top third and it consumed an outrageous total of 5-6kwh a day! The major flaw of the tasteless refrigerator is that the doors are placed on the side. A permissible make should take into account the fact that cold air is more dense that the rest of the air in your house and will drop in height when given the chance. Well, the cold air in your refrigerator gets that opening every time you open the door. As you gaze inside to agree your next meal, all of the cold air rushes out by your feet and is substituted by warmer air from your living space that will now need to be cooled. Also, the magnetic door seals, no matter how air tight when they are new, will inevitably make imperfections and allow the cooled air to seep through constantly.

Refrigerator Door Seals

An sufficient refrigerator make must start with a well insulated chest style container. If you don't want to build your own, you're in luck because any chest freezer will work wonderfully. Cool air from within the unit will not leak because the door is placed on the top. Also, each time you open the refrigerator to grab something to eat the cool air will stay inside and will not need to be recooled as soon as you shut the door.

The safe bet problem with using a chest freezer as your refrigerator is that its thermostat is set for a temperature range far to low. To solve this problem, it is valuable to setup another circuit with a thermostat and relay switch to make sure the temperature stays at about 4 degrees Celsius. Basically, this circuit must turn on the freezer compressor when the temperature rises above 4 C and turn off when the temperature drops below 4 C. The simplest choice would be to find a cooling line voltage thermostat with a range of 0 - 10 C but I couldn't find one so I had to use a quarterly heating thermostat with a range of about 0-30 C. If I set this heating thermostat at 4 C and hooked it up to my chest freezer, it would turn on the freezer when the temperature dropped below 4 C and this would only make it colder or if the temperature was above 4 C the thermostat would never turn on the freezer! More investigate was needed to solve this problem.

The solution I found was the Spdt relay switch. An Spdt relay uses the electromagnetic force of a coil to operate a switch in another circuit and this relay allowed me to use a heating thermostat to correctly operate freezer compressor. When the heating thermostat reads a temperature of 3 C it will close its circuit and this will allow current through the relay coil and flip the switch to the off position. When the heating thermostat reads a temperature of 5 C, it will open its circuit and this will stop the current through the relay coil and close the other circuit thereby turning on the freezer compressor.

In order to get wires to the new thermostat inside the refrigerator, I opened up the drain plug at the lowest corner of the unit. The hole is taped shut with duct tape inside. The relay switch is just tucked away in the middle of the wall and the refrigerator for now. I'll build a nice circuit box for it at some point.

I can keep all of the same foods in this chest refrigerator but the society has changed because the door is on the top. I found two Rubbermaid bins that fit the large warehouse area quite well. I stack one on top of the other and just pull out the top one when I want to get at stuff in the bottom. I understanding this process might get annoying but I found that I rarely have to do this if I just put my long term warehouse items in the lowest box and all of my daily used items in the top container.

Since the main presume for this project was power conservation I should fill you in on the performance of this chest refrigerator. I plugged my power metre into this unit for a few days and found that it used about 200wh a day on average. That's only 2 cents a day of electricity and a huge drop from my former power sucking model that used 5-6 kwh a day. The most sufficient refrigerators you can buy new today use colse to 1 kwh a day and this make uses only one fifth of that!

This incompatibility in power consumption only means a few dollars a year on my power bill if you are already hooked up to the grid but if you consider buying solar panels to power your household technology then this incompatibility in power consumption means spending thousands of dollars less on solar panels so the straightforward change to a chest refrigerator makes living off the grid much more viable.

How to Make Your Own High Efficiency Refrigerator

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What Is vigor Efficiency?

Basically, energy efficiency is anyone that helps lower your power bill and conserves natural resources. Say you have a power hog of a refrigerator with a door seal that is missing and you install a new door seal - have you made the refrigerator more power efficient? For the desire to save power and lower our power bill, then, yes - you have made the refrigerator more energy efficient. I like this definition. Too bad it's not correct.

By replacing the refrigerator door seal, energy has been saved, but, of course, the refrigerator is still the old hog it all the time was. It seems saving energy is not the same as energy efficiency. Wish it was that simple, but if it lowers the power bill, it might be energy savings and it might be energy efficiency.

Refrigerator Door Seals

Well, lets leave the door seal behind and look at energy efficiency this way.

Converting Energy: Converting energy from it's natural form, ( oil, natural gas, hydro ) to our intended use is never completely successful. Some power is not fully converted and escapes and is lost. In older natural gas furnaces, for example, less than 60% of the inherent energy in the gas as a matter of fact heats the living room.

For years now, researchers and analysts have carefully the gross national product and power consumption to be associated at the elbows. The Gnp increased and energy consumption increased and that was just the way it was. The heck with refrigerator door seals, there were more refrigerators so there was more energy consumption and that was Ok.

We look at a door seal a microscopic differently today. We now perceive that to sustain our proper of living, our security, and our environment, we need to come to be more efficient. The term energy sufficient then describes our efforts to cut energy waste and supply more energy benefits with less environmental damage.

The benefits of energy Efficiency: energy Security: I have heard that some conservationist feel that energy efficiency won't as a matter of fact get favorite until home security becomes more closely associated to conservation. In this case, security goes a microscopic beyond an private home. energy security for communities means less dependency on foreign fuel supplies and less vulnerability to price and supply fluctuations.

Environmental Healing: saving energy is the same as wasting less energy. Wasting less energy allows the environment more time to recover from the damage caused by energy exploration and use. Each time you install a new big screen Tv or push the temperature up on the thermostat, you and the environment have a microscopic healing to do.

Sustainable Energy: hereafter generations are going to appreciate the energy we don't waste. Who knows, maybe person in a hereafter generation or two would like to have some fossil fuel to burn.

Lifestyle reaction to living energy efficient.

An energy sufficient lifestyle then is both the desire to identify and to spoton energy waste:

Yes, I sold the hummer - I drive a Honda Accord now. I set the thermostat at 68 degrees instead of 74 degrees now. I turned the temperature down on the water heater and wash in cold water now. I have changed all my light bulbs to compact fluorescent.

On an average, data and study indicate, our homes use one-and-a-half times as much energy as energy sufficient homes. It's a good thing to conserve energy, something to be proud of, something to brag about, something to gift our children.

Thank you for stopping by, hope to see you soon, but I won't leave the light on for you...

What Is vigor Efficiency?

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improving the power Efficiency of Your Refrigerator

Next to heating and cooling costs, refrigerators are one of the biggest household expenses. Because they essentially run all the time, the easiest ways to save electricity is straight through efficiency. Here are a few practical tips to help your refrigerator run as smoothly as possible

Consider upgrading

Refrigerator Door Seals

If you have a fridge that was made prior to 2002, you should think upgrading to a current model. The latest vigor effective models use less than half the electricity of 1993-2000 model fridges. For example if you replace a 1992 fridge with a fridge that has an vigor star rating, you could save 00 over the life of the fridge.

Don't put hot foods in the fridge

On the outset this one is a diminutive bit of a compromise. It is recommended for our protection to refrigerate hot food to forestall contamination. However, the health and protection guidelines are a diminutive bit flexible. The recommendation is to refrigerate with 2 hours of establishment for temperatures below 90 degrees. Within 1 hour for warmer temperatures. Of procedure the sooner the food is refrigerated, the safer it will be.

Limit your trips to the fridge

Opening a fridge door apparently can inventory for up to 25% of the used energy. Try and limit the whole of times the door is opened and for how long.

Defrost your fridge

If your fridge does not automatically defrost, defrost it before the ice builds more than ¼ of an inch. Immoderate ice makes the fridge work harder. If you still own a fridge that requires defrosting, than it is probably an older model. So hopefully after reading this report you'll have the motivation and data to get up and find a newer model.

Clean the coils on your fridge

The coils are located at the back or underneath the fridge. If the coils are coated with dust, then the fridge will be running less efficiently because the dust doesn't allow the heat to leave away from the fridge. You can in fact clean the coils with a wire brush or a vacuum.

Inspect the rubber seal on the door

If the rubber seal that lines the door doesn't close properly, then of procedure the fridge efficiency will be reduced. Check out your fridge's seal and mend with some adhesive glue if required.

improving the power Efficiency of Your Refrigerator

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