Some tricks to diminish the energy consumption of your refrigerator this summer

Date published : July 7th, 2008, Article number : 50, Rating :

The summer is the most difficult season for refrigerators because the surrounding air is a lot hotter, and each time you open the door, your appliance works hard to restore the right temperature. The summer is also the season where you refrigerator is most likely to pass away. If you aren’t ready to replace your fridge, then it is important to know a few facts in order to prevent breakages better. Here are a few tricks to avoid breakages while saving energy and money.

Firstly, it is important to know that refrigerators are the household appliances that use up the most electricity in the house. Indeed, contrarily to cooking hobs or washers and dryers, refrigerators function 24 hours a day and constantly fight against external heat in order to preserve the right temperature for foods. It is thus evident that this energy consumption increases during the summer.

It is also important to be aware that each time you open the fridge’s door, up to 30% of the refrigerated air escapes from it. It stands to reason that it is preferable to choose what you want to take out of the refrigerator before opening the door and to identify the foods that you put there. As there is a loss of cold air every time you open the door, and thus a temperature increase inside of the fridge, it works had to restore it, using up a lot more energy, and tiring the compressor more. So it is important to choose what you will make for dinner because opening the door!

The site of your refrigerator in your kitchen, particularly its positioning in relation to the other appliances, is also important in relation to its overwork and to its energy consumption. This fact is particularly true in the case of the oven, of the cooking hob and of the stove. Indeed, these are next to the refrigerator, the heat that they release when you cook forces the latter to work harder to keep its cold air. So it is preferable, as far as possible, to avoid placing these two household appliances one next to another. This is a small gesture that will be cost-effective all year long, but particularly during the warm season.

These are little tricks that will help you preserve your refrigerator. However, if your refrigerator is somewhat old, it is important to ask yourself if you really want to keep it and if so, at what energetic and environmental cost. Think about it, an ENERGY STAR refrigerator model purchased today uses 40% less energy than a typical model that would have been purchased in 2001. Worse still, a refrigerator purchased in 1990 uses twice more energy than an ENERGY STAR certified model purchased in 2008.

So you should not keep your old appliance at any cost. Even if it is still functional, its energetic and environmental cost is without a doubt way too high in comparison to the one your new appliance could have. So it is an excellent gesture to think about changing your old fridge, particularly just before the warm season, because that’s when it will use the most energy during the whole year.

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