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Turning the fridge off at night.. well yes you save a bit of energy, but fridges need to be kept at the same low temperature. It would make more sense to increase the insulation on the fridge itself.

As for the pilot light, surely the amount it uses is trivial? If the zero tax cutoff is 4.5therms, and as you say the pilot light uses anywhere from 4-12therms per month... somthing doesnt add up there. According to that youd allmost certainly be above the tax cutoff point from just having your pilot light on.

those kind of efficiency drives wont save much energy at all. plus, when you turn your fridge on in the morning, it would use up a lot more energy getting back to its cold temperature, probably cancelling out any benefits of turning it off.

the only thing left on in my house overnight is the fridge and pilot light for the central heating and also my alarm clock to wake me up.

You would save much more getting rid of the fridge altogether.

Buy the fresh food you need daily. Switch to drinking water.

Fruits and veggies will last out on the counter for sometime. So will your bread.

You could buy powdered milk and mix it up as you need it.

I wouldn't turn the fridge off as I doubt you'd see much in savings from it. Insulating the fridge better is the way to go or look into building a chest fridge
http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html that would put you at about 1.1 cents/day for the fridge

pilot lights add up over the year so turning them off when the heater isn't going to be used makes sense. Even if you do it each night and relight in the morning it's still less hassle then heating purely with wood

Insulate the fridge ... but do not shut it down.
Unless you really want to measure the maximum number of bowel movements your intestines can generate in a day

I think your trying to save energy, but are focusing on the small stuff and getting diminishing returns.

Plot your energy usage out on a pie chart and focus on the largest slices and how to reduce them. That is where you'll get the biggest bang for your money and time spent. My guess is that it is probably going to be heat/AC, water heater, washing/drying clothing, dishwasher (if you have one), and maybe cooking. Shutting off a pilot light and refridgerator at night is going to be almost immaterial in savings.

According to this, a fridge costs $55/year to operate or $0.15 per day.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/r/l/rlb286/

If you could save 1/2 of the cost, which I highly doubt, that's a whopping 7 cents per day. That's not worth the trouble.

Try a chest freezer set to fridge temps - way more efficent. Most reasonable size energy star ones come in at less than 1kWh/day.

Another way to lower fridge usage is one of those "green" plugs - it changes the voltage /power usage of the compressor on a constant basis. I saw a power reduction of like 10% with one of those.

-G

I thought about a couple of ways of improving the efficiency of a fridge.

However, when I measured the energy consumption of mine - it came out at less than 0.5 kWh per day (averaged over a week).

Your effort would be best spent looking elsewhere. Home heating, or a proper freezer are much more significant energy consumers.

Yes, pilot lights are inefficient and account for significant waste - 4 therms / month is probably quite a good estimate. However, if your heating is being used every day, then it's likely that teh saving will be outweighed by the inconvenience, of having to light up each day. However, in Summer there's no point in keeping it on (unless you need it for hot water).

If your heating is old enough to have a pilot light, then the chances are it's approaching the end of its life anyway, and will have far lower efficiency than a modern system.

You might be better off to sell your fridge and buy a portable cooler which are normally used for cars and they run off 12 volt dc, very useful if your using dc when using solar power pannels.

Another option is to use a small freezer (yours if you have one or a neighbours) and an Esky, once a day or two place a freeze pack into the Esky, that should be very energy efficent and keep the Esky cool for a day or two.

tinosorb wrote:Does anyone do this? What are your experiences? Food will not last as long, but I think it might be worthwhile to do it, and increase the grocery trips to twice a week by bike, if I can get a good grip on how much I need to last only a few days at a time.

I am also considering turning off the pilot light for the central heat unit. I have read that the pilot light alone consumes anywhere from 4-12 therms per month.

I keep looking for inventive ways to cut back but it seems I can't break even with increasing prices.

My electric use is currently $27.86/mo (around $0.11/kWh) but if I get it down to 11.71 I will not have to pay utility tax, and if I keep my NG consumption down to about 4.5 therms per mo I will not have to pay tax on that, either.

If you do not use your fridge to capacity one of the best ways to save energy is water. What I mean is, if your fridge is mostly or even partly empty on a regular basis every time you open the door you let tha colum of cold air out, which the fridge has to replace when you close the door. If you are only actually using half the volume inside the fridge you can save a lot of energy by placing containers like milk jugs or soda bottles filled with water in the regularly empty sapce. This has two benefits, the bottles take up space which would hold cold air you release when the door is open, and the water in the bottles after cooling to fridge temperature act as large heat sinks, if the power goes out for any reason they help keep the fridge cool inside and help keep food from spoiling.

We live off-grid, with photovoltaic & wind power, but this can work for anyone: put your refrigerator on the porch during the winter!

Recently we endured an 8-day spell of freezing fog, with very little solar generation and no wind power. Our battery bank is sized to supply a normal use for about 3 days, so we were starting to hurt a bit. So we decided to unplug the fridge and put it on the front porch to conserve power. Voila! With the diffuse bit of solar generation trickling in through the fog we were able to sustain our basic power needs: lights and water pumping, indefinitely. When the weather got back to "normal" we re-plugged the fridge in but left it on the porch. It occasionally runs during the day, rarely at night as it's so much cooler outside than inside.

You need to make sure you can maintain the food at the proper temps for safety.

Most of us have fridges that are much too large for necessity. You really only need to refridgerate a few things (some medications, meat, milk, possibly eggs, etc) at low temps. Others, such as fresh vegs, can be kept at low room temps if provided with moisture. A small fridge can probably maintain sufficient coldness if provided with plenty of insulation and thermal mass. Thermal mass can be blocks of ice, bottles of water, or plenty of beer (my fave).

I think it would be difficult to run tests to make sure the fridge wasn't using more energy to get itself back up to temperature after the night. But since hot water heater timers supposedly save energy by shutting off water heater when not needed, theoretically this should work with a fridge too. But be sure to get a thermometer to make sure your food remains at a safe temperature. Avoid opening the door when the fridge is off (obviously). This makes it difficult to check the temp. Check in the morning before the unit comes back on.

I should add there's nothing wrong with a large fridge if it contains enough thermal mass. Buy more beer.

Unplug the damn thing and eat canned goods or stop eating all together

Surely larger firdges would have greater surface area, therefore loosing more heat?

You said that you dry 2 loads per month (you obviously must live alone!) but one way to further save on energy cost is to air dry your clothes. Purchase a drying rack, and it will pay for itself in a few months' time.