refrigerators and freezers
The different types of refrigerators and freezers are:
- Single Door Refrigerators/Freezers: Have manual or push-button defrost and if regularly defrosted they can be economical.
- Cyclic Defrost: Requires the freezer to be manually defrosted.
- Frost Free Refrigerators: Do not need defrosting of freezer or cooler compartment.
- Chest Freezers: Have a top opening lid and more economical to run as they hold cold air more efficiently.
- Vertical/Upright freezers: Have front opening doors, so packing and unpacking can be done relatively easily.
- Refrigerators with the freezer on either the bottom or top are the most efficient. Bottom freezer models use approximately 16 percent less energy than side-by-side models and top freezer models use about 13 percent less than side-by-side.
- Purchase refrigerators and freezers with energy rating labels.
- Avoid very large refrigerators, as these will be a waste of energy, space and money.
- Avoid having many gaps in the refrigerator or freezer. This is because the area to cool will be larger thus more electricity is consumed. To counter this, you can fill up the spaces in your refrigerator or freezer by placing empty ice cream containers, or have them filled with water.
- Manual defrost model will use half the energy of an automatic defrost model, but it has to be defrosted regularly for keeping it energy efficient.
- Leave a space between the condenser coils and the walls or cabinet for proper circulation of air.
- Check door seals to ensure they are airtight.
- Check the temperature regularly. A fridge that is 10 degrees colder than consume at 25% more electricity.
- Open the doors as little as possible. The more you keep the door open, the more heat enters the fridge, causing it to consume almost 50% more electricity.
- Allow foods to cool before you put them in the refrigerator or freezer, as putting hot foods will unnecessarily increase the electricity consumption
