What's more energy efficient? a full fridge or an empty fridge?
Sustainability Quotes
from local businesses
This debate has been raging round the internet for a while now, so I thought I might have a look into it and see what’s the most efficient way to run your fridge. Given that energy saving and food wastage are two of the hot topics (if you’ll excuse the pun) of the moment, I think that the results might just surprise you!
We all want to reduce the amount of energy that we use in our homes, so when you’re done switching off lights and turning off unused appliances at the wall it’s natural that you might want to start thinking about the appliances that you use all the time.
A fridge has two functions, to cool anything that’s been put in it down to a certain temperature and then to maintain this temperature. The more stuff you put in a fridge the greater the amount of energy it has to expend to bring that down to the set temperature. So you might think that it would be more energy efficient to keep the fridge as empty as possible, thereby reducing the amount of ‘work’ that the fridge has to do.
However the general consensus appears to be, that once the food in the fridge has been brought down to the set temperature, it then acts as ballast, meaning that the fridge therefore needs to expend less energy to keep itself at a cool temperature.
Effectively this cold food takes up the space instead of cold air in the fridge, so when you open the door to your fridge, there is less cold air available to rush out - meaning that once the door of the fridge is closed again the fridge has to work less hard to bring the temperature inside back down to it’s ideal level.So basically, if you never want to open the door to your fridge then an empty one may take up less energy. But if you’ve got an empty fridge that you never use, you might as well switch it off at the wall and be done with it!However if you actually want to use your fridge occasionally, but you don’t like keeping too much food in the house the fridge will run better if you keep some containers of water in it. These will not only act as ballast but you’ll never get dehydrated with a constant supply of cold water to hand!
So, in short - a full fridge is better than an empty one, and if you hardly use it at all turn it off!
The other ways to keep the energy your fridge uses to a minimum are to open and close the door as little as possible, as quickly as possible, and make sure that the fresh stuff you’re putting in it is as cool as possible.
Sustainability Quotes
from local businesses
