Comments on Crunchy Chicken: Why turning off your fridge costs more energy

Here's a silly question: If I freeze water in ...

2011-10-05T11:34:24.525-07:00

Here's a silly question: If I freeze water in the chest freezer, and then put it in the fridge (as Sharon describes), but DON'T unplug it, does that get me the best of both worlds? A fridge that almost never runs, but has a failsafe?

Good post! Now... a different topic. What about ...

2011-10-05T11:26:40.752-07:00

Good post! Now... a different topic. What about no range? I don't use mine. Few pots and pans to buy/wash. We use the microwave for a few things, electric skillet, electric wok and countertop toaster oven. I did the killowatt thing and we're ahead in electricity usage by doing this because the stove takes longer to cook than these single use items. Also the cost of a range is usually $1K plus and those four small appliances are less than $300.

This won't work for large families but there are only two of us and it works well.

My three year old absolutely loves broccoli. Add ...

2010-11-14T10:47:13.899-08:00

My three year old absolutely loves broccoli.

Add me to the list of "almost fridge-free". If I didn't have it, very little would change. I store a little milk in it (when we have land and our goat, I won't need that), sometimes a bit of leftovers, and a bunch of condiments that don't need to be there.

I can my food at home. I put up meat in pint jars, so there's very little waste. Around here, for half of the year it's either canned/frozen or "fresh" from thousands of miles away.

I've been looking into other food preservation methods, too, like fermented foods.

Thank you for sharing this one. This is a good tip...

2010-01-05T17:39:51.394-08:00

Thank you for sharing this one. This is a good tip for me. I have been using 2 fridge for my chicken meat and eggs. Thanks again.

2009-09-26T14:06:20.222-07:00

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Going to leave Canada to go south for the winter i...

2009-09-26T14:06:00.834-07:00

Going to leave Canada to go south for the winter in two months. I will slowly empty my fridge, clean it, leave the doors open and unplug it before I leave. I'll see when I get back whether I will plug it back in when I come back in April!

I know it's several months after this great conver...

2009-05-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

I know it's several months after this great conversation, but I just unplugged my fridge 15 minutes ago after much deliberation for months, and reading Thistle's and Greenpa's sites/posts about no refrigeration. I backpacked for 6 months some years ago and did just fine without refrigerated foods. It seemed like a silly luxury when I was back in society. I'm trying to sell my fridge, so the interim time will by my experiment. I've adjusted to not owning a car (2 yrs now) so I think I can adjust to this. I welcome it! Full disclosure - single, no kids, city dweller. Should be easy. I love the challenge of shifting my comfort zone!
Also, other than manufacture's info, is there a true way to measure energy output of a fridge? Electric bill shows total usage.

fascinating conversation. I'm surprised no one has...

2009-02-09T10:41:00.000-08:00

fascinating conversation. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that raw milk can be stored outside of a fridge for several days without spoiling; even in the summer, we left raw milk unrefrigerated on the counter for a day or more without souring. and when it *does* sour, it's simply a different taste; the live cultures ferment it into a new sort of beverage.

If we ever go without a fridge (something we've considered, even with a family of five and three of them young children), we will definitely replace most of our refrigeration with fermentation. our house was built in 1912 and still has an icebox built into the kitchen; it's likely we'd repurpose that.

In replacement of canning and fresh fruits, dried fruit is a sensible alternative and my children love raisins, dried cranberries and dried cherries and can subsist quite happily without a refrigerator for these things. as for lettuce, we only eat it in season so spoilage is never an issue.

the main struggle i'd have with no fridge would be homemade jam; i don't use sugar to make jam (honey instead) so it can only "live" for a few days once I've opened it. I guess I'd have to switch to smaller jam jars, or just eat a lot at once, which isn't exactly an enormous problem :)

I moved onto a boat, but I recommend that anyone t...

2009-02-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

I moved onto a boat, but I recommend that anyone trying to lessen their carbon footprint - or electricity bill - unplug their fridge. For two months.
Most people don't really use their fridge. They store ten-year-old condiments that didn't need refrigeration. They have rotting vegetables. They have fattening prepackaged food. They have assorted stuff that doesn't add up to a meal.
When you live out of an icebox, you think about what you really want in there. You finish what you have, instead of tacos one night and Chinese the next. You become more efficient.
And then, when you do have access to a fridge, you look forward to cooking seventeen servings of dinner for yourself and freezing it. Or keeping dough in the fridge for a week and baking a little bit each night. Or cleaning your plate and dumping those leftover bones into a "soup bowl" for the future.
By the way, most food only has to be below 40 degrees - hardly Siberian. For most of the year, you can have a cold beer just by putting it out on the porch.
It's good to just REMEMBER the silliness of trying to cool down a box inside your house down to 40 degrees in the winter, while another appliance tries to warm your house up to 65. And it's good to realize this during an ice storm - when I heard reporters wailing that the worst part of losing power was that "all the food will spoil!"

There are also gas refrigerator/freezers available...

2009-02-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

There are also gas refrigerator/freezers available that use kerosene or Natural gas available from Lehmans.com. Good for going off the grid, and they operate silently.

An advanced technological society will always requ...

2009-02-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

An advanced technological society will always require electricity. But the problem is on an institutional level. The problem isn't the electricity--it's the source. It's nice that people are committed to reducing their environmental footprint, but imaging how much things would change if that energy was devoted to social and political change.

And what about solar refrigerators and freezers? T...

2009-02-05T03:00:00.000-08:00

And what about solar refrigerators and freezers? They are out there you know and then one isn't using electricity. It seems to me it's the best of both worlds. There are solar chest freezers and refrigerators. There is even a solar refrigerator that looks just like an electric refrigerator.

Just makes no sense for me to give up refrigeration as it saves me so much energy use in the end. Not to mention being a major food preserver.

To each his/her own, though.

How about turning a chest freezer into a fridge by...

2009-01-31T02:44:00.000-08:00

How about turning a chest freezer into a fridge by modifying the thermostat. The cold air stays in when you open it, the freezer is better insulated so it uses 1% of the energy of a regular fridge. It just stack differently. People are doing this: http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html
I've now done it. Works a treat!

I would disagree and say it is totally possible to...

2009-01-30T17:10:00.000-08:00

I would disagree and say it is totally possible to turn off the fridge, but yes it might mean that you don't get to have fresh milk every day. Even easier if you keep a freezer turned on.

Most (vegetarian) foods are just fine if they are stored outside the fridge in a closed container for a day or two. For things that won't, drying, canning, and eating seasonally available foods are good options, even if you live in an urab environment (where it would be even easier IMO).

As for time- you can still buy most dry goods in bulk, just make them up as needed.

Take it with a grain of salt, since I still have my fridge turned on (don't wnt to ruin it by leavign it unplugged, and my cat DOES eat some raw food that requires a fridge). But I would seriously consider having no or only a tiny fridge if I lived in a place I owned- very very little in my fridge NEEDS to be there.

I don't think my husband would ever allow me t...

2009-01-27T15:31:00.000-08:00

I don't think my husband would ever allow me to do that. That said, I think I would certainly be willing to give it a try when we move to Egypt, where we can get our food fresh from the market DAILY and they don't have "bulk" stores. I think it's reasonable to assume that it could work better there. But in the meantime, I will be doing the research on what it's like to live fridge-less> but not without a deep freezer if I can avoid it.
This whole discussion has been interesting. I have a fridge and deep freezer right now, though the freezer is almost empty, and probably needs to be shut off. I think that I need to work on my food-wasting issues before I even think of starting to go no-fridge.

I just want to note, for those in cold climates, y...

2009-01-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

I just want to note, for those in cold climates, you can have a *very* small cold room.

My kitchen cabinets are against an uninsulated North wall. I'm in Minneapolis. We have at least 4 months of the year (probably more like 6, I haven't checked) when our cupboards are colder than the fridge. We had to insulate the bottom cupboards because they were causing a cold breeze across the floor.

If you own your house, you could insulate the house-facing parts of a cupboard and pull the insulation out of the wall behind it, and have a very, very cold cupboard, with no other changes to your kitchen.

On the list of all the things I'd be willing to gi...

2009-01-27T11:37:00.000-08:00

On the list of all the things I'd be willing to give up to "save the planet" the two at the bottom are toilet paper and my refrigerator.

However, I may ultimately not have a choice in the matter. So, in the interest of not dying of food poisoning if I can no longer afford (or obtain) electricity, I'm VERY happy to make note of how others live without refrigeration and I have serious plans to test said methods, very soon.

To stick one's fingers in one's ears and chant "la la la" when people start talking about giving up their refrigerators may be a TAD shortsighted.

I'm just sayin'.

OK, I live in a very hot place, and if I preserved...

2009-01-27T10:55:00.000-08:00

OK, I live in a very hot place, and if I preserved everything in glass, I would need no fridge. Here I refrigerate everything else including pasta and rice because I have to. However, for those of you who need the refrigerator, some of the commenters did point out the BIG IMPORTANT MESSAGE OF THIS DONNYBROOK and that is get a chest refrigerator or a chest freezer and save bigtime on the KWatts. Chest means horizontal, the door swings up, the cold stays in. No doorway type door so that when you open the door, all the cold spills out. That would be the best short term massive power saver for the country. Vertical cooling units should be outlawed. Greenpa, I am putting you in charge of this, call the vertical police! And also, Greenpa, that freezer you have is the Rolls Royce of freezers. DC even! How are you powering that dream appliance? Oh I am just so damn jealous.

Greenpa - Sorry for the assumption on your state o...

2009-01-26T21:30:00.000-08:00

Greenpa - Sorry for the assumption on your state of the art equipment. I was using an incorrect equation:

Old geezer = old freezer :)

"A big source of disagreement in the conversation here comes from person A speaking about generalities; and person B responding with a specific instance. Not the same thing, folks!!"

I'm a little perturbed that you assume that I'm the one talking specifics when you are just as guilty. I think I represent far more people, generally speaking, than your setup. So, I may use myself as an example in the argument, but my circumstances are far more representative of the general population, in spite of what you think.

And furthermore, I do not stand in front of an open fridge for minutes at a time, multiple times during the day. I would have to yell at myself for doing that. My kids never open the fridge. Hubby is another story.

OK, so you're not ready to ditch your fridge entir...

2009-01-26T20:48:00.000-08:00

OK, so you're not ready to ditch your fridge entirely. Have you considered a chest fridge? Approx 36kwh per year!

Greenpa, I think so many of us associate fridges a...

2009-01-26T18:56:00.000-08:00

Greenpa, I think so many of us associate fridges and freezers so closely because most of us are so used to the fridge/freezer units. Also, almost everything you can store in the fridge (most importantly, leftovers/bulk cooking, meat, cheese, butter, and produce), you can store in the freezer. Having a freezer would make a big difference (at least to me) when going fridgeless. I wouldn't say that they are totally different tools.

I'm not ready to go frig-less yet, but I could for...

2009-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

I'm not ready to go frig-less yet, but I could foresee it happening. My frig is who knows how old (it came with the house). It's irreplaceable with the average frig because it's built into the wall, with storage around it. To find a frig that would be small enough to fit into that space would probably cost a lot more than the average frig. At that point in time, I couldn't even purchase the average frig.

I do live in an icebox of sorts; it's been below zero five of the last six weeks, so I could see taking advantage of all this cold.

In my wanderings around the web, I did find reference to a Zeer pot, which is quite interesting:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/22792

Thanks for the correction on the riot electric fig...

2009-01-26T16:38:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the correction on the riot electric figures - I wrote them, actually, so I should remember offhand what the number is, but didn't bother to link over and look it up. And I did mean to write "per household."

Sharon

Back when TheBoy and I moved into our apartment, w...

2009-01-26T14:53:00.000-08:00

Back when TheBoy and I moved into our apartment, we had to buy a new fridge simply because we didn't have one and had never even considered going fridge-free.
Of course, it took two weeks for the back-ordered appliance to make it to our home and, for those two weeks, we lived without freon. Our cooler couldn't protect even ice from the L.A. August heat, so we just ate vegan and fresh for those weeks. Remarkably, we did so without really suffering any hardship (other than cheddar... I would've traded my fingers for cheddar that week). Worthwhile experience!

Don't have much to add except that there's no way ...

2009-01-26T12:01:00.000-08:00

Don't have much to add except that there's no way I'll go without a fridge. All those folks saying we could do without it in the winter at least didn't walk out into 80 degree sunshine today like we did in FL.