This has been discussed before here and on other forums. Its a sweet setup. I would be doing this right now, but my wife doesn't like going into the basement for food! (thats where i have a chest freezer). You can buy one of the smaller Haier freezers for around 100bucks and modify away. Very cheap to run. We have a very efficient refrigerator (new) and it still runs all the time in this midwest heat (house temp around 78F).

One of the cheapest was to improve the efficiency of a fridge or freezer is to ad thermal mass. Simply fill up as much unused space as you can with milk jugs or plastic pop bottles full of water.

Every time you open the door of an upright fridge the heavier cold air falls out and the warm moist air that enters needs to be cooled even a chest freezer loses some of the cold air.

Since the ice doesn’t fall out the door the amount of air the jug displaces doesn’t need re-chilling.

I still have plans in my head to increase the insulation of our 2 freezers by first building a rigid insulation board box around them and second building a vent to the condenser to open air. Doesn’t make much sense to take the heat out of the freezer and pump it into the room to be reabsorbed….

In the kitchen remodel I am cutting a vent to the crawlspace in the fridge nook and using a gasket in the opening for the fridge. In the summer the heat will be vented out and in the winter the heat will be vented inside.

You have to watch some of the new chest freezers don't have external coils so you can't wrap the entire freezer in insulation since they need to expel the heat out of the back. It's a real tick off on my new/old freezer because I'd put it in an insulated box of I had my choice.

Cool. I'd not see that.

Both of ours are pretty new and have this tiny little grate for outflow, the box would probably not be so airtight to not allow makeup air to enter.

What I am thinking anyway setting here and not doing it.

I'm planning to super insulate a chest freezer and have been conducting some preliminary experimentation. Every fridge / freezer I've ever looked round the back of has the heat exchanger coils there (keep them dust free for max efficiency) which makes the put it in a box plan somewhat difficult.

Plan B is therefore to attach extra insulation to the casing leaving the back as the fuckwit product designers intended. One note of caution to those following this path: The extra insulation and resulting temperature gradient means that the casing becomes much colder leading to condensation issues. This rules out water absorbent insulation materials e.g. fleece or rockwool but also means you really need closed cell airtight material that is bonded to the casing.

It gets harder: all the f/f's I've seen dismembered have been insulated with rockwool / fibreglass and i'm not convinced that this is installed airtight so I think this is also in danger of getting wet/frozen, thus losing the benefits of the original insulation and potentially wetting the floor / electrics. I had this happen once with an old but otherwise unmolested freezer but it may have been down to (rust) pinholing the case.

Anyway, that's as far as I've got so far. Further experimentation depends on buying a nice new upright A+ rated, German built freezer for shop bought food so I can take the chest freezer out of service for a proper fettling and a (cheaper) return for storing garden produce.

As an aside, do you guys in iMerika have (simple for the masses) energy ratings for appliances like we do in Blighty and uRope?

Yeah it's called energystar here in canada and I believe it's identical in the US. Basically it reports "average" yearly KWH usage of the device and compares it to other similar models. It's not a bad start to picking a new appliance but on things like washers it's not the best since it doesn't take how dry it leaves the clothes into account and drying will eat up far more power in the end.

We've been super efficiant for a month now. No fridge at all! The damn thing almost went up in flames before I unplugged it! So it's been the ice chest experience while waiting on a new fridge to arrive. Two more weeks! Woooohoooooo!

Wish I would of known about this efficiant fridge before plunking down our money!

We've also been hanging out the laundry most of the summer now and avoiding the dryer.
cb

No that is transition!

My thought is rigid foam board as an additional insulator. Pricey but somewhat structural – though flammable.

The key seems to me is to vent the warm air from the coil to open air instead of venting it to indoor air that recalculates over the coils.

I asked friend in Seattle what they did about the fridge when the power went off for several days.

Response was some people took the food out of the fridge and cooked it.

Others used charcoal grills indoors to try to keep warm during the power outage [all about electric in Seattle area]. And ...

I'm starting to investigate electric future in New Mexico.

Thanks Strider. Ours are rated in KWh p.a. too. I'm curious as to what is considered energy efficient in North America c/w Europe given that there are large differences in personal transport efficiency. I know you have big fridges/freezers but are they 7.0 V8's or turbo diesels!

For example, an 'A+' rated upright freezer I just looked at has a capacity of 293 litres and (under standard test conditions) consumes 319 KWh per year. A big 'A' rated chest freezer was 368 (about 13 cu ft) litres for 350 KWh.

These appear to have insulation about 50mm (2 inches) thick, old D/E rated models have around half this.

Anyone have figures to compare?

Yeah... here is my new refrigerator i bought from sears. It was "energy star" Kenmore.

Mine is 18.2 cu ft with 4.1 cu ft of that being freezer.

This one is suppose to use 407 KwH's per year.

We bought this...


So i decided to check how much water is actually going down our drain (out to the Mississippi River eventually).


(thats a 32gallon garbage can)


Washed this much clothing.



I'm not impressed. This is suppose to be a low water usage, high efficiency machine. Maybe it is, but i didn't think it used this much, thats close to 30 gallons of water for a small load of mostly socks and undies. I could probably wash this stuff by hand and use less then 10 gallons, but they probably wouldn't get as clean. I plan on dumping this water on some of my shrubs, no use letting it go to waste.


We are on a well, so the well pump probably kicked on a few times to do this load of wash (240V/1/2hp submersible pump). I've got to do the math to see how much energy was used(along with the energy used by the washing machine), but it looks like a lot of water for such a small load. We use cold water for washing here. Even if you are on city water, electricity is still being used to either pump the water up from the ground, or move it from some other source. Nationwide, we must use a ton of electricity/gas/water daily to wash are clothing?

That's an upright washer correct?

I don't know what technical things they are doing to justify the green label, but as far as I know, upright washers always will use more water than even the non fancy looking side loaders. They simply don't have to deal with gravity taking all that water down away from the clothing like the uprights do.

I'd check and see what a comparibly priced side loader would do.

shoulda gotten a front loader