Anecdote, but I rescued a 1947 Kelvinator C-7-R (essentially a 1930's pre-war design) last year from the National Grid fridge scrapping scheme. It'd sat in an unheated garage since 1993, after being continually in use by the same family from 1948 to 1993. I plugged it in once I got home, and it cooled down to 38F within an hour. :)
Functionally, it just needs a new door seal to go back into service. Unfortunately I turned it into another restoration project... the original glass drawers got smashed in the 70's, and replaced with pieces of wood paneling, the interior door panel is cracked, and most importantly, it needs all the wiring replaced.
Something of note for post-war appliances like this; due to copper shortages, a lot of manufacturers switched to aluminum wire. This, combined with the natural rubber insulation, and the lack of grounding, it's basically waiting to electrocute me, then set my house on fire.
A lot of other 40's and 50's appliances are probably the same in terms of aluminum wiring. Pretty much everything prior to the 70's is gonna be full of natural rubber insulation and no grounding (or double insulation), however.
Much better than you'd think --- I have a late 30s Frigidaire which consumes a bit less than 300kWh/year, which is actually on the low side compared to some of the newest ones today. GE's famous Monitor Tops from the same era (which sell for absurd $$$ in working condition today) are also very energy-efficient:
The ones with the highest consumption are the late 60s to 80s thin-walled ones (which makes for more interior space, but obviously less insulation) and those with defrost heaters.
It's both depressing and a bit amusing, both from the point of view of historical accuracy and saving working products from being scrapped, that a basic search on how much energy a fridge uses turns up misleading results like https://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/refrigerators.html --- that one cuts off at 1976, and is essentially claiming 2200kWh/year for all models before that year, which is a gross generalisation and exaggeration. 2200kWh/year is equivalent to consuming 250W for 24/7. The compressor in my fridge has a rated power of less than 100W, and certainly doesn't run 24/7.
Here in Germany you have to try hard to buy a full sized freezer/fridge with more than 150 kWh/a. 75 kWh/a is not unusual. Maybe the benchmark is different.
The thing I think is really interesting about this is the implication that efficiency got much worse before starting to get better.
I guess intuitively that makes sense since the first refrigerators were probably upgraded actual "ice boxes", where efficiency is obviously very important.
Electrical costs were also quite high --- many places still had not been electrified yet. Combine that with The Great Depression and efficiency definitely became a concern and marketing point.
An aside but i'd like to point out the biggest design difference and why that changed. The doors. They used to have a latch. That resulted in numerous deaths of children. The modern design using magnetic seals came about because of this.
Similar reasons, at least. There is also usually a way to access the passenger compartment from the trunk.
If you like to be prepared for worst case scenarios, get a friend to duct tape your hands together and lock you in the trunk of your car and see if you can escape. Make sure the friend sticks around to rescue you if you fail or cry out for help.
That’s such a weird piece of americana... I wonder if there are studies of how many lives this has saved vs the cost of all car manufacturers adapting their US models to put inner-boot handles
I was curious just how many kids were killed by the old style refrigerators. I remember when I was a kid TV shows would have special episodes warning of the danger of being locked inside by accident. Unfortunately the articles cited on that Wikipedia page don't have good numbers. There are a handful of anecdotes at the end of the article, but sadly no statistics.
I have a feeling this is one of those cases where a small handful of cases got a disproportionate amount of media attention. It doesn't hurt to fix the problem, but it ends up being one of thousands of possible problems that people arbitrarily decided to fixate on.
From the Wikipedia article: For example, statistics for the 18 months from January 1954 to June 1956 show that 54 children were known to have been trapped in household refrigerators, and that 39 of them died.[6]
Full of toxic plastic, insufficient insulation, energy wasting door construction, poor compressor and condenser placement, almost no thermal mass, highly toxic and expensive refrigerant gas, uneconomic to service generally. Basically, they’re cheap boxes of toxins designed to be discarded and replaced!
Hmm, there could be some context I'm missing, but his comments on this come across to me as a bit ill-informed. But I'm just an avid DIYer who has taken apart and repaired many appliances, so take as you will.
> toxic plastic
I'm not sure what this is referring to. You don't normally eat (or eat off of) the plastic components of a refrigerator. Maybe this is more an environmental concern than a health one?
> almost no thermal mass
Isn't this a desirable property of a highly-insulated box? Ideally, the most thermal mass should come from its contents, not the appliance itself.
> highly toxic and expensive refrigerant gas
R134a is the most common refrigerant used in residential refrigerators these days, which is not particularly toxic to humans. It's the primary ingredient in canned air dusters and no one seems to have a problem with that. 30lb tanks of this can be had for a little over $100, and a refrigerator would hold less than a pound of it. It does have a very high GWP though--an environmental concern, not a health one. (Side note -- I've also noticed propane (R-290) is becoming more common in commercial refrigerators.)
> energy hogging
To be fair, modern refrigerator compressors have become much more energy efficient than they used to be. Additionally, a variable speed compressor would have previously been unheard of in a residential appliance, but are now becoming relatively common in middle-to-high-end refrigerators.
> uneconomic to service generally
Well, this is hard to refute :) The problem is definitely broader than refrigerators, but residential appliances do seem particularly prone to it. One issue here is that refrigeration work in particular requires special equipment and expertise. From my experience, parts are often the least expensive aspect of repairing an appliance.
I mostly agree, although as an owner of a late 30s refrigerator I personally restored, I'd say there hasn't been much improvements on the mechanical side of things --- the increased efficiency largely comes from better insulation (I reinsulated mine qhen I restored it.)
The only refrigerants I'd consider "toxic" are things like SO2 and ammonia, both of which haven't been used in domestic machines for a long time (mine uses the original R114); and in fact the biggest selling point of CFCs and HFCs is that they're both nontoxic and nonflammable, while offering comparable efficiency. We might still be using CFCs today, if people hadn't been so cavalier with releasing them into the atmosphere.
As someone dealing with a failed fridge right now, I’d beg to differ.
Most modern fridges rely on controllers that are vulnerable to fail in high heat conditions, which are common given the awful placement of the coils and motors of fridges.
The pursuit of energy efficiency replaced easily serviced, long lasting gear with “efficient” junk with a MTBF of ~60 months. I have a garage fridge that my dad pulled out of the garbage 35 years ago.
> given the awful placement of the coils and motors of fridges.
Oh, man. So much this. The refrigerator that came with my house, a circa 2006 Samsung, has coils that grow ice. The (evaporator?) fan is positioned in such a way that the ice eventually grows into the fan blades. First it makes a super-annoying scraping sound, then the temperature in the fridge slowly creeps up to unsafe levels.
The fix only takes about an hour. You have to remove the back panel and defrost the coils with a hair dryer. I've done it a couple times now.
It boggles my mind that we can't have nicer appliances. I'd certainly be willing to pay more at this point in my life, but I have zero confidence I wouldn't just be paying more for the same trash.
Modern fridges have a defrost cycle built in which does this automatically. Are you by any chance in a high humidity location or running the fridge without adequate ventilation? You could possibly ask the service staff to adjust the thing to make it run more frequently, or request a replacement controller.
> Modern fridges have a defrost cycle built in which does this automatically.
I believe you. The point is this doesn't work very well. It's a pretty common complaint with the model.
> Are you by any chance in a high humidity location or running the fridge without adequate ventilation?
Eh, I have AC and a dehumidifier. The humidity is well under control inside my house.
As for ventilation, the refrigerator is in the only place you could possibly put a refrigerator in my kitchen. If it's not designed to work for that placement, then Samsung has no business being in the refrigerator business.
> You could possibly ask the service staff to adjust the thing to make it run more frequently, or request a replacement controller.
I am the service staff. I'm sure I could spend a good chunk of money on this. I'd rather not. I don't enjoy it, but manually defrosting the coils every eight months beats handing a couple hundy to a service person.
Issue is with controllers is that you can't manually defrost anymore.
They rely on boards like you said, or thermistors that only close when cold to turn on the defrost coil.
Look up if your fridge has an actual manual defrost method(rather than your 'manual' defrost). Some of them are rather absurd. But if you're lucky enough to have one you can simply force extra defrosts when it's real hot/fridge being opened often instead of having to pull the shroud and manually do it.
First Test Method:
Turn the thermostat off for 15 seconds.
Turn the thermostat on for 5 seconds.
Turn the thermostat off for 15 seconds.
Turn the thermostat on for 5 seconds.
Turn the thermostat off for 15 seconds.
Turn the thermostat on for 5 seconds.
Turn the thermostat off.*
If I follow you, you're suggesting I look up some of the obscure button sequences to press to force some hidden behavior? We did that early on and didn't get great results.
I wonder if the drain is clogged or otherwise not working well, leading to more water in the air that ends up freezing on the fan.
My freezer drain would clog with ice, after a couple manual defrost cycles, I figured out the resistance heater that's supposed to keep the drain from freezing was just a little bit misaligned, a slight bend and it hasn't clogged since.
The Whirlpool bottom freezer model I own has a defective radiator design, where significant parts of the radiator are only cleanable by tipping the appliance and accessing from below.
Not being the Hulk, I’m not regularly lifting a 300+ lb appliance and I doubt anyone else is. So every few years, it overheats in the summer.
It also shipped with a defective drain plug that would get blocked by a biofilm and cause the whole fridge to ice up. That was eventually recalled.
All of this is incompetence and engineering malpractice, committed by one of the largest and well respected appliance manufacturers. Their sole priority is engineered reliability to maximize revenue.
The concerns he expresses are environmental, both in terms of energy efficiency (wasted fossil fuel energy) and in terms of lifecycle (component disposal).
There are many refrigerants in active use, not just R134a. The positive trend in developed countries (particularly Europe) is towards R744 (high pressure CO2) for commercial use. However, most refrigerants are still a long way from clean, including R134a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane
That article is a just a bunch of rambling drivel. There is no supporting document or links to back his claims. I guess if you feel the same way its a great article but if you are looking for validation you will not find it there.
Regardless of how they are built they must meet government standards for energy efficiency which is expressed in the simplest terms for most people, as in kWh/Year and how much that will cost you per year to run. Seeing that some brands highlight their efficiency its pretty easy to shoot down his rant because that is all it is.
I disagree. I think the article is one in a long series which show clearly that the guy is investigating some different aspects of refrigeration systems and has an appreciation for the historical development of the technology plus current issues. He's briefly summarizing current issues in an opinionated way, and I think he does a pretty good job. I think he perhaps has less insight in to other areas such as manufacturing costs and consumer appliance supply chain and logistics concerns. Government energy efficiency metrics can be gamed and do not tell the full story.
Very cool series of articles. I wish there was more variety in household refrigerators, too! The one thing I always wished was on the market was a refrigerator where all the moving, noise-making bits could be mounted under the floor, in the crawlspace, with the connection to the box being plumbed up through the floor. They market these for commercial use but I couldn't find anyone who would install one in a house when I was building my house.
My company just designed a from-scratch refrigeration circuit over the 12 months pre-COVID in China. It was more interesting than you would think. Our need was high density (no wasted space). Due to the need, I visited a bunch of fridge factories. The guy is right. Most of them are insulated with blown foam, which is terrible stuff both during production and afterwards (for the environment). Also, most of them are still filled with toxic refrigerants.
Little known fact: Albert Einstein and Leo Szillard worked on refrigerator designs in the early 30s. They didn't find commercial success but the designs are revisited occasionally. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator)
(Leo Szillard conceived of chain nuclear reaction few years later and this friendship with Einstein allowed him to indirectly petition Roosevelt to start the Manhattan Project.)
It always blew my mind that refrigerator gas used to murder people in their homes.
aka "The two were motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes into their home"
An aside, but watching old 40s and 50s programming (older silent movies as well) do expose you to a bit of how things were back then -iceboxes in people’s homes, the decor they used, lighting choices, modes of transport, undershirt habits, milkmen, ice blocks, all kinds of incidental things outside of the main thrust of a movie or TV programming.
This is true but you may also encounter some anachronisms. For example, married couples sleeping in separate beds was not something that historically happened- it was just how TV producers dealt with censorship dictated by The Hays Code, the rules that governed what could be shown in television and film. If you tried to use programming from the 40s and 50s you might wonder why none of these people seem to have indoor toilets!
Used to be quite common for gay people to have kids heterosexually; at one time it was more or less socially expected that everyone would marry and have children, particularly in the middle classes.
Not widely known is that if all the HFCs currently in use end up vented, it will produce as much greenhouse effect as all the CO2 currently in the atmosphere, and do it orders of magnitude longer than the CO2.
We all thought that HFCs would save the world from the Ozone Hole, not realizing what a disaster they would turn out to be. Specify refrigeration equipment that uses ammonia or propane refrigerant.
It was still very common when I was a kid - as were handwritten bills of sale. That's probably not mere coincidence. (I haven't been a kid in quite a while.)
I forgot where I heard or read that fridges were one the main factor driving post war urbanism, supermarkets/mall far away. Prior to cheap refrigeration people just bought local and ate fresh because they had no choice.
Pickles. Everything was pickled because it didn't keep otherwise. The invention of the refrigerator significantly reduced the incidents of stomach cancer.
backup cameras are nice, but are marginal at best as safety features even though they're marketed heavily that way. they're for convenience, so we don't have to crane our necks when backing up or parking. seat belts, on the other hand, have easily saved thousands of lives.
point being, mandating backup cameras is an overreach of safety regulation, but not for seat belts.
The individual who lead the effort to mandate backup cameras (after backing over and killing his son) cited ~200 deaths and 15,000 injuries, annually, mostly small children and elderly [1]. I don't know if I'd call it overreach, but I also don't know what the equation is for cost versus tragedy when looking at an issue like this.
running over anyone is tragic, and i'm not trying to make light of it, but that's the same misapplication of risk, fear, and bias that lead to security theater, housing crises and regulatory capture generally.
we don't regulate for the people (US, annually) who accidentally drown in a bathtub (~300) and get injured in a bathroom (~250k), even though it would address more harms (at a larger scale and possibly greater cost, depending on the mitigations).
Backup cameras cover a blind spot behind the car that’s large enough for a child to not be seen if you’re craning your neck the old-fashioned way. Obviously they aren’t as important as seatbelts, but the biggest improvements to a new invention tend to be the ones invented earlier anyway.
The next big safety feature will be one which lowers windows in the presence of an occupant in the rear area if an occupant has not been observed in the drivers seat for x minutes if the temp is above 60F/16C for example.
While it would be obviously a good idea it will not be do-able from a technological point... first, because such a detection, most likely with cameras, would need to always run even when the car is powered off. That means a lot of electricity being wasted. Second, because it will get abused by thieves - projecting, e.g. with a laser, something onto the cameras and boom, the windows open.
Functionally, it just needs a new door seal to go back into service. Unfortunately I turned it into another restoration project... the original glass drawers got smashed in the 70's, and replaced with pieces of wood paneling, the interior door panel is cracked, and most importantly, it needs all the wiring replaced.
Something of note for post-war appliances like this; due to copper shortages, a lot of manufacturers switched to aluminum wire. This, combined with the natural rubber insulation, and the lack of grounding, it's basically waiting to electrocute me, then set my house on fire.
A lot of other 40's and 50's appliances are probably the same in terms of aluminum wiring. Pretty much everything prior to the 70's is gonna be full of natural rubber insulation and no grounding (or double insulation), however.