Managing your refrigerator

You go shopping for a new fridge, and you’re on a budget. The best buy is the “fridge with the lowest sales price and pleasant to the eyes”, right? Much as these might be valid points, buying a new fridge is a big task including size, tech additions like water and ice dispensers. So now you have bought your new fridge, what next?

First and foremost, let us give a nod to the O-level physics teacher and acknowledge all they said about how a fridge works though all is forgotten, I think. See when a fluid evaporates, it removes heat.

If you want to prove it yourself, you can lick the back of your hand and blow on it to dry it. Feel the cooling effect? Well a fridge uses the same principle.

Inside the fridge, is a long coil containing a coolant. The coolant boils at a very low temperature, and even if it is already fairly cold inside the fridge, there is enough heat to make the coolant evaporate.

When the coolant evaporates, it absorbs heat and therefore, the coil inside the fridge feels cold. The coil containing the evaporated coolant continues outside the fridge into a compressor.

The compressor is a kind of pump that pressurises the vapours and pushes it into another long coil called a condenser. During its journey, the vapour condenses and becomes liquid. This is the exact opposite of what happened inside the fridge.

Final stage
When the coolant condenses from vapour to its liquid form, it dissipates all the heat it previously absorbed in the process of evaporation. Therefore, the coil outside the fridge feels warm. In other words, the coolant absorbs heat inside the fridge and releases heat outside and then it flows back into the fridge and starts all over.

Because of the way it works, a fridge over time becomes less efficient resulting in higher energy costs. This is generally not a function of the fridge itself, but of the surroundings that it resides within and how it is generally used.

As a basic example of this, a hot space will cause your fridge to run more often than if it was in a cool space.
Running longer makes it less efficient. The user manual clearly indicates the operation guidelines and recommends right placements for optimum operation.

Temperature determines the fridge’s life
Sometimes we forget that fridges have temperature control settings. Check your fridges temperature control setting. The higher the control is set at, the longer and more often the fridge will run.

If you want to minimise your electric bill, it’s up to you to correctly set the temperature control. Of course, you’ve no way of knowing just how low a number (how high an interior temperature) you can select which will keep things from spoiling.

The setting must be presently set to some value right now which does the job or you’d have turned it up higher anyway. So, decrease it to one number and wait a few days. If all’s well, lower it by one more number. Repeat until you begin to notice that it’s not doing the job as you wish it to. It is sometimes common to place warm or lukewarm food items into your fridge, because you have not got time to wait for it to cool completely.
Instead wait until food is completely cool before placing it into the fridge. This will ensure that your fridge is not having to work overtime to compensate for the sudden heat differential and will ensure that you maximise your fridge energy savings.

Saving energy
In these dark days where power is such a scarce commodity, having a background of how a fridge works can help you and the fridge with some simple workarounds and keep stuff cool a little longer when there’s no power. For instance, the energy it takes to cool stuff is lost every time you open the door of the fridge.

Before you open the door, decide what it is you’re after. And, if it is breakfast, lunch, or supper you’re working on, get everything you need in one go.

One long opening is less wasteful than item-by-item door openings which “fan” cold air out and warm air in. Some newer fridges have inherent technologies to “continue” cooling without power.

Today’s fridges, however, are very energy efficient. Those sold today use about one-tenth of the amount of electricity of those that were built 20 years ago.

So, if you have an old fridge, it’s better to buy a new one because you’ll save money in power savings.

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