Seek… locate… refrigerate

If you enjoy long, boring posts about refrigerators then you’re in for a pleasant surprise!

The story starts at the weekend where, I was checking my recent power consumption, according to the smart meter stats held by my energy company. No, this isn’t get any more exciting than this! Since April there’s been a sharp rise in electricity usage (kWh, not cost) during the day. I expected the night one to go up due to my car charging, but not day time.

My power company does a usage breakdown, which is a rough estimate of where the electricity appears to be going – it only gives you the breakdown for the current and previous week and shows usage her device, not any kind of trend. But, the biggest user of power in my house is… refrigeration.

I have 2 in the house – a small chest freezer that I bought a few years ago and a much older fridge-freezer. Upon looking it up, it’s 13 years old. It appears to be working just fine and average life span for one is 10-20 years. However, one the documented signs that it needs replacing is an unexpected rise in electric usage.

Coincidentally, the same day I’d been listening to a podcast that was talking about this exact subject (refrigeration) and they’d said that they loose a whole level of economy rating within the first year alone (so if they’re “A” rated when you buy it, after a year it will be “B”). So, whether it is the fridge-freezer or not, it certainly seems beneficial to replace it anyway.

For the size space we had, there was only one A-rated product available, so that’s what we’ve bought. It has excellent ratings too. I have no idea what rating our current fridge-freezer had, but these often get revised – looking at the energy use of it when new and comparing that to the others current available, it would now be a D-rating (and used twice what our new one will).

So, as boring as tracking your energy usage may be, it’s useful to highlight things like this. Hopefully, when it’s installed, we’ll see the usage trend drop back down. If not, it’s onto other things to investigate. But, nothing is lost because, as I say, our old fridge-freezer, even at best, was using twice the energy of the new one and, right now, is probably using much, much less. Whatever the outcome, we’ll benefit.

As much as people, for the sake of the environment, want to promote keeping things going as long as possible, there’s a secondary impact such as this – old products are just no where near as efficient. They loose efficiency over time but, also, manufacturers are producing products which are better from the get-go.

AO delivered it and took the old one away – they have a state-of-the-art recycling facility, which was good to know. Once set up and running, it wasn’t until I opened the fridge door and got a waft of cold air that I realised I hadn’t experienced that for some time – the old fridge was definitely not working well but hadn’t been noticed (probably a drop in performance steadily in time).

Has it made a difference? Well, it was installed about a week before the end of August, so only contributed one quarter to that month. However, the difference is dramatic – the total refrigeration usage (and remember I also have a, separate, freezer as well) for August has halved. And if you wonder how much of a dent that makes to total energy usage, here’s a graph of the power I use at home.

The red line is the one you need to pay most attention to – as you can see, there’s been a steady rise for a few months which was down to the refrigeration. The last month has seen a dramatic drop and, when we get a complete month, I’m sure it’s going to even more so. The green line, representing overnight electricity use, has also gone up but I expected that because of charging my car, which I’ve only had a few months – however, refrigeration doesn’t stop overnight (although the door rarely gets opened!) so that may too come down a little as a result.