Even so, the cost of running a refrigerator is on the order of $100 per year. I can easily see a split system or duct system costing 5-10x that amount. That’s going to eat up your cost savings, and drastically increase the difficulty of servicing and replacing the fridge when it goes down.
watts up with that.
it is true if the current stayed the same then it it would be twice the watts.
in real life the watts stay the same and the current is cut in half.
sigh … please go back and re-read the original message I was responding to when I wrote the first wattage-related post.
Snnipe 70E was saying: “But our 24 cu ft unit only draws a little over 5 amps. A good size window shaker draws 10 to 15 amps.” I was asking whether that 5 amps was on a 110 volt circuit, or a 220 volt circuit, so that I could tell whether his/her 24 cu ft unit was drawing 550 watts, or 1100 watts.
Which I still don’t know the answer to, by the way.
What people often overlook is that all the energy used in your house that generates heat, has to be offset by cooling energy in summer. For example your hot water heater. If your water heater uses $50 worth of energy to create heat, all of that heat energy remains in your house (except maybe hot water that goes down the drain) and you will spend another $50 compensating for it by AC. (Not exactly 1:1, but you get the idea.) When the water heater kicks back on, it’s replacing the heat that leaked through the insulation into your house. Similarly, all your light bulbs and Mr. Coffee machine are turning energy into heat, and it takes the same amount more energy to negate that heat.
Which is why I keep my water heater in the garage, separated from the rest of the house by a nice healthy layer of wall insulation.
us, 120 vac
If you are near San Jose, you would actually be better off keeping it inside the house, since the number of heating degree•days far exceeds the number of cooling degree•days:
http://ggweather.com/sjc/daily_records.html
Hi,
This is an interesting discussion. I thought a lot about something like this couple of years ago, when I bought my home with a largish, geriatric refrigerator that sounded like a small lawn mower and belched out enough heat to make the kitchen noticeably hotter than the rest of the house. I figured the first thing I would do is replace the refrigerator with a new one.
I bought a cheap one that was within my meager budget, and it wasn’t real impressive from an energy guide standpoint. It still puts about 1/2 the heat into the kitchen compared to the old one. This summer is a lot cooler than last year so I don’t notice it much, but I would argue that even a more efficient fridge makes too much heat in the kitchen in the summer. I live in Minnesota, so there are only three months in which I might need air conditioning, but I do still think it’s inefficient to dump warm air into a room with one appliance and then try to take it out with another.
My old RV had a propane fridge (with ammonia for refrigerant), and it was just positioned in a location where the outside air could mix with the condenser. I could see tucking the fridge into a cove that had a free flow of air with the outside like that, just to give that warm air somewhere else to float off to. Then have some kind of insulated door to put between the back of the fridge and the outside during the cold months.