Energy Conservation tips for Refrigerator

Energy Conservation tips for Your Home Refrigerator

Here are some energy saving tips we can easily follow to save some bucks from home electricity bills. Feel free to ask questions you have or suggest more energy conservation measures you know. Household refrigerators works on Vapour compression refrigeration Cycle which absorbs heat from inside and releases it outside using an energy absorbing device. i.e. Compressor. This is the component which uses electricity. By some easy habits and simple tricks you can improve the performance of your refrigerator. Lets know how!

1. Keep Your Refrigerator away from heat

Refrigerator is heat exhausting appliance. It has compressor, motor and condenser in it. All these parts are hot and they need to be cooled sufficiently. For this, Always keep buffer space around your refrigerator specifically at the back. Some refrigerators have condensers at the sides. So better practice is to keep space from all sides of refrigerator. Most of the modern kitchens have space constraints and this makes it difficult to leave space around it. But this makes the compressor to work more for same amount of cooling and consumes more electricity. Make sure to have free air circulation around it. Also make sure some other heat source is not exposed to refrigerator. Like heater, oven, burner, sunlight, dish-washer etc. A direct sunlight from window or door if falling on the refrigerator unit for long time then it is time to locate the refrigerator to another location.

2. Proper sealing of refrigerator

The chill inside the refrigerator is expensive. Always make sure the refrigerator door seals are clean and tight. Older refrigerator seals get weak and dirty that could not seal perfectly and gaps are found in the door seal. These gaps keeps loosing the coolness inside the fridge and there is a way to check this! Keep a light torch inside the refrigerator and after closing the door, inspect the sealing edge for leakage of light from it. If there is significant light you can see, there is much more cooling lost. Replace the gasket periodically with new one. This gasket is a place for large amount of bacteria as well.

    

3. Keep it clean inside and outside

Some refrigerators have condenser coils at back of refrigerator hanging away from the unit. They are there to loose heat to surrounding and they are hot. Clean them periodically by cleaning dust from its surface so that the heat transfer from it is easy and fast. Modern refrigerators have condenser at sides contained inside the unit itself. In that case make sure free air flow around the unit.

4. Do not Keep the door open for long time 

It is more meaningful to say, keep the door closed as long as possible! Whenever you open the door, the refrigerator loose the freezing inside and hot outside air gets inside the refrigerator which increases load on compressor to work harder to get it cooled again. So it is best practice to decide what you want from the refrigerator first before opening it and then get it out carefully.  People have habit of unnecessarily opening the refrigerator to check what is there to eat for small hunger!  
Also it is good habit to organize food inside the refrigerator so that you can find easily what you want. There is insight on what to put and where to put it. Things like ice-cream and ice trays are always put inside freezer which is coldest and at the top. The temperature will increase from top towards the bottom. Then below the freezer, keep milk food which need temperatures near 4^oC and below that comes your usual food stuff and lastly fruits and vegetables at the bottom. Prefer to put water bottles, cold drinks, eggs in door which is less colder that other locations.

5. Do not Put hot food inside refrigerator

Refrigerator consumes electricity to cool objects inside it. A hot object can be cooled in atmosphere if kept on table for some time. For example, a hot milk vessel should be cooled to atmospheric temperature first before putting it into fridge. This will save pennies from your power bills.

6. Have a  habit of regular defrosts

 Modern refrigerators are frost free. But if your refrigerator is old, or not working properly, you can see some amount of ice on cooling coils inside freezer/evaporator. This ice acts as insulator and prevents heat transfer to coils from compartment. This makes the compressor to work more for cooling of the food and the cooling coil temperature decreases more which accumulates more ice on the coils. This is not a good thing for your refrigerator at all. So better practice is to defrost the fridge regularly and clean it at the same time. Keeping  food inside compartment which looses more moisture should be avoided. E.g. hot soup/milk

7. Keep the temperature Optimum

Refrigerator comes with thermostat scale from 1 to 5. 1 means least cooling and 5 means highest cooling. As long as possible keep the knob to lower cooling near to 1 or 2. This will keep the temperature inside the refrigerator around 4 to 10^oC and it is best for food. For freezing we need to have temperature below 0^oC and it is kept in freezer. Either keep the stuff you want to freeze in freezer compartment or better to go with double door refrigerators. Slight increase in set temperature in the compartment will save much more power use by reducing duty cycle of the compressor.

8. Energy Efficient Refrigerators

Now a day refrigerators get BEE certificate with star labels. The 5 star refrigerators are highly efficient refrigerators but they are costlier one. Use of refrigerators over a period of time makes it preferable to use good star labelled appliance for saving money. Do check the star label on the refrigerator before purchasing. BEE has provide an app to cross check whether the product( with product code on it) is certified with BEE or not. Modern refrigerators come with inverter compressor which are highly recommended for energy efficiency.

9. Do not overfill the refrigerator

People fill it like old cupboard. Medicines and chocolates from months are hidden inside it found after their expiry!

Hope you implement these tips and contribute to energy conservation!