I am getting a refridgerator tommorrow, and wanted to keep it in the garage, but I live in Michigan and it gets damn cold here. Someone here at work heard something about this on one of those do-it-yourself talk shows on the radio. They said the ambient temperature should not get below 60 or you could damage the mechanism, but I can’t find anything about it on the web.
If the temperature drops to below freezing, the fridge and freezer will stop working because the heat exchange mechanism will not work. This is more important for the freezer than the fridge as the freezer will slowly move up to ambient temperature.
I have a fridge/freezer in an unheated part of the house. Winter temperatures drop to about -7C or about 20F outside here in England (about 28F in that part of the house) and the unit stops working once or twice a year for 24 hours or so. It hasn’t damaged the unit, or at least it keeps on working.
Sure you can. Living in cold climes you know that stuff may freeze though.We kept our freezer on an unheated back porch at one of our other houses and had no ill results. My parents keep their freezer in their unheated garage with no problems.
PS i’m from Iowa temps get to -25f sometimes.
Oh it gets to 105f sometimes too
Hey, another Michigander. Welcome.
Yeah, in the winter, the stuff in your fridge may freeze but as long as you don’t mind slushy milk and hard apples, you shouldn’t have a prob.
I keep a freezer in my garage, done it for 6 years, no problem. NJ isn’t as cold as Michigan in the winter, generally, but we’ve had lotsa snow on at least 2 of those 6 winters, and still no problem.
I don’t know anything about whether or not it will freeze, but one issue you need to keep in mind is if you have the kind of electrical outlets that switch off in case of a power surge. My garage has these for all the garage outlets, and I used to have a freezer in there until we lost everything in it because the outlet flipped itself off. It’s one of those things that can happen and you don’t even realize it, so make sure that you plug the fridge into an outlet that will stay live, regardless of what the other outlets in the house are doing.
Growing up, we always had an extra fridge on the back porch. Never had any problems.
A friend of mine keeps a fridge (well it’s a Keggerator* actually) in his garage with no problems.
'Course, this is Florida so YMMV.
*They took an old fridge, drilled a hole in the front and installed a draft beer dispenser. Only thing inside the fridge is a huge bar keg and a CO[sub]2[/sub] tap. This way, they never have to open the fridge for another beer. They just pour it at the door.
would you kindly explain the thermodynamics of this to me??? Why would a heat exchanger that is trying to vent heat to the outside world function less effectively when it’s colder outside and hence easier to shed all those watts?
granted, the compressor may not turn on for a day or two because it doesn’t need to chill the inside of the fridge since it’s already cold enough and there is no source of heat to raise that temp.