With the warmer weather we’ve been having over the past month I’ve seen our power usage going up and have noticed my fridge is running a little more now as well. Also my fridge is on a smart plug so the numbers are spot on.
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Wow @mike_gessner
Yours uses a lot of electricity.
Mine is more efficient than I thought. Something I try to do that most people don’t is clean it every 6 months. I have a brush that is 30” long and a matching vacuum attachment that goes with it. I pull the front cover and brush all of the lint from the coils and vacuum all of it out.
My fridge is also in an enclosed space with less than an inch of airflow on both sides and only 2” on the top.
I keep the fridge at 37 and freezer at 0
Here is mine for comparison
I do the cleaning every few months (at once a year), and yeah there is a lot of dust/pet hair. Now that I have sense I was hoping to see any usage differences, but I can’t. I mean it’s probably still a good idea to-do. On the other hand cleaning the dryer vent pipe (actually replacing it) made a huge difference (20% less run time).
In both my house and my sister’s Sense hasn’t yet identified all “elements” of the refrigerator. I’ve read but cant confirm that there are separate compressors for the refrigerator section and the freezer section, and the defroster hasn’t been identified. Also, I think mine has a variable speed compressor so it hasn’t been identified at all. I think I’ve identified it myself by listening and watching Sense “live”, but it’s still categorized as unknown. I’m hesitant to use one of my HS-110s on the fridge because I don’t want to have the fridge further away from the back wall.
On the subject of whether having water/ice in the compartments will save electricity, I’m not a believer. I do agree that more mass will help regulate the temperature variations, but thermodynamics says that most of the energy for a fridge goes into making up for the heat transfer across the insulated walls, and that’s not affected by the mass of the items in the fridge.
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I would find it highly unlikely that there are separate compressors for fridge and freezer. At least, I’ve never seen one. There is a damper door with an actuator that controls and adjust flow. There are many components to a fridge. Sense has detected my ice maker, door dispenser, compressor and defrost elements. My fridge has about 12 separate components but most are very low wattage and I think what has been identified is all that will be on mine.
Having your fridge or freezer filled versus empty will absolutely save money. My in laws had a couple homes and this is something we tested on their homes where they lived in each part time.
Sub Zero, Thermador, and Miele units have dual compressors. Higher end GE units have one compressor and two evaporator coils - one dedicated to each of the refrigerator and freezer sections. It’s interesting how they’re marketing the feature as a way of keeping the humidity higher in the fridge section than anything to do with energy efficiency. Samsung also has twin evaporators and a single inverter compressor - besides higher humidity in the fridge it also markets “no odor exchange” as a feature. Samsung also has their T Style fridge with two compressors and three evaporators. Here in the U.S. I think they call the feature FlexZone because in addition to a fridge and freezer sections, they have a “Flex” section that you can set to either fridge, freezer, soft freeze, or chill/meat.
LG I think only has one compressor but it’s a digital linear compressor (aka inverter compressor aka variable compressor), so Sense may have a hard time picking it up.
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My Blomberg BRFB1312 has an inverter (variable) compressor which has not been natively detected by Sense. I cautiously put it on a Wemo a couple of months ago and am waiting until the data accumulates before posting to the Device Library.
At one point I thought it was faulty because of the long run cycles but you can see it runs for longer at lower energy levels.
Compressor/fan ramps from about 30-50W and rarely to 65W
Defrost is once every 24hrs, 150W for 20min
Annual usage is somewhat lower than the Energy Label.
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