Energy Efficient Refrigerator Update: Four months on

This is an update for our earlier post Energy Efficient Refrigerator Hack.

So were we crazy to give up our old fridge?  

Pros:

On the utility bill side, there's no question that the new set-up, even with the addition of a separate chest freezer for actual freezing, is working.  Our daily household energy consumption (data provided by our utility company) dropped by a little more than 5 kwh immediately following the switch. In our area, that works out to about $20 a month, or 19 months for the energy savings to entirely pay for the purchase of two new chest freezers and a temperature controller.  We also got a $50 rebate from our utility provider for recycling the mechanical parts of our old fridge (not included in above calculation).  If you only account for the cost of the temperature controller and chest freezer we turned into a refrigerator the payoff is more like 10 months.

Note that our old fridge was a twenty year old behemoth and the door didn't always close correctly, so this is possibly an extreme case for savings potential.

Aside from the energy savings and the new energy efficient fridge, we also got a chest freezer out of the deal that we are actually using. Is freezing tomatoes more energy efficient than canning them on a propane stove?

We're also still liking the narrow profile, counter-like function/feel of the chest refrigerator in our small kitchen.  If we ever redo our kitchen, we'll probably put the fridge on castors and have it roll out from underneath a counter.  For now, its nice to have the fridge double as the one counter top that we always keep clear of stuff.

Cons:

Traditional stand-up refrigerators are more expensive because they come with some features that a hacked chest refrigerator lacks, e.g., dehumidification, even temperature control.

This means that a) the bottom of our chest refrigerator accumulates water and b) no matter how much we fiddle with the temperature control settings, the bottom is colder than the top.

In normal refrigerators and freezers with a defrost setting, excess moisture drips down into a drain at the bottom and goes into a condensate pan underneath.  In freezers without auto defrost the moisture builds up as layers of ice on the sides that you then occasionally scrape off.

In our chest refrigerator, the moisture just drips down into the bottom and stays there.  This means that we have to take everything out of the fridge once a month and wipe up the water.

We haven't really had a chance to notice if food is spoiling faster because of this yet (mostly because food doesn't stick around very long in our house). We did make an additional investment in a nice tupperware set and are trying to be good about making sure everything in the fridge is wrapped up tightly so as not to add more water.

Wiping up the water at the bottom is honestly a pain, but it does force us to pull out the stuff we're not likely to use and feed it to the chickens and wipe down and sanitize the sides of the fridge on a regular basis.  

Someone told us that we should look into getting a small dehumidifier of the type used for snake tanks, but we haven't looked into this yet.

Now for awkward temperature control:

Basically there is no real solution for this.  The bottom of the chest refrigerator will always be colder than the top, sometimes even frozen.  It took a bit of fiddling with the temperature controller to find a sweet spot where the top of our fridge is just cold enough and the bottom is just above icy.  We still do sometimes see ice on the bottom depending on where the fridge is in its cooling cycle.  We've dealt with this by basically not keeping much in the very bottom (except for things like lemon juice or flour, where it doesn't matter if it freezes and thaws) and keeping things that we use faster or that don't need to be kept as cold in the baskets at the top.  This also helps prevent us from forgetting about things on the bottom and letting them spoil, since most of the things we keep down there don't have expiration dates.

Another downside is that we could never have our kitchen certified for commercial production of anything that has to be kept cold.

In other cons, the chest refrigerator seems to be running very hot, as in, the outside of it is sometimes warm to the touch.  J thinks this is normal, I think its a bit too warm to be normal.  Our chest-freezer-for-freezing isn't as hot, but it is also a smaller and a more efficient model.

So in conclusion, we're still happy with our chest refrigerator (and REALLY happy to have scrapped our  old fridge), but its mostly working for us because of a combination of our lifestyle, the particular layout of our small kitchen, and the fact that we're willing to accept a little bit of inconvenience to make the whole thing work.