Okay, but hear me out. If you reverse it, you’ll have a heat pump oven that also cools your house. 🤓
Would be great for people that love yogurt.
a heat pump oven sounds like an actually cool idea. why is it not a thing yet?
The difference between oven temperature and room temperature is too high for it to be efficient. Like, a fridge is maybe cooling things 30F (~15C) maybe 50 (~25) for the freezer. An oven goes to like 500F 260C, so it would have to maintain a heat differential of like 430 (~215) degrees. Like, it’s just less efficient than a resistive coil at that point.
hmm brb imma go invent a refrigeration cycle that runs 15C <-> 250C
Fridges have always been doing that for ages. I’d rather not let them dump heat indoors and instead move the heat directly outdoors to keep my air conditioner from running too hard.
Yeah but now you’ve got to find a place to store or how to discard all the little arrows, and the orange light probably is too bright at night
No joke, I think thermal networking will one day be common in homes.
It exists to some extent already in large commercial building design if only because the business sense of the added efficiency is easy to illustrate at that scale.
especially in areas with district heating, it’s a massive resource we’re just throwing away currently.
i want that too. lots of houses already have hot and cold water lines so it shouldn’t be too hard. problem is getting appliances to adopt a standard on how to connect to this network
Can anyone explain why almost everyone operates a fridge inside a heated house in winter while there is “a fridge outside”. Would the fridge not need less power to cool down the insides when it’s already cold outside?
Am I really the only one in this world with a fridge outside?
- Stability. Temperature outside fluctuates, food could freeze or get too warm.
- Containment. The fridge prevents critters from getting to your food.
- Location. The fridge is conveniently located in the kitchen.
In winter I do tend to keep drinks outside if the temps are alright, they cool down faster outside than in a fridge anyway.
I am using a fridge outside: It is like a small balcony first floor with a roof and cool most of the year. So #1 and #2 are checked. For #3 I have a small Japanese compressor fridge in the kitchen, only for the very important daily things like milk. The mustard stays in the outside fridge. The kitchen fridge never uses more than 30W for cooling. But only IF it runs. So that checks #3.
This was originally what cellars and basements were for. Ground temperature was stable relative to outside temperatures, so it was warmer than freezing during winter but colder than outside during summer. Thus it could help preserve food.
Some old farm houses still have that around here. But it is outside below a small hill or a slope. Some call it Kartoffel Keller. And some still use it for long time storage.
Sometimes they’re called a “root cellar” in the US, as they were often used for storing root vegetables; carrots, turnips and potatoes. So common etymology there.
if you’re already heating your home, then what does it hurt to have the fridge do a bit more of that?
in fact, the fridge is a tiny heat pump using your food as the reservoir. so unless your house is heat pump equipped, it is beneficial energy wise to keep the fridge inside.
if your house is heat pump equipped, then it depends on how the efficiency compare. if you put lots of hot food into your fridge then you should
definitelyprobably keep it inside.Don’t forget that refrigeration is costly tech magic though. Power hungry and requires toxic chemicals.
Real easy answer: keeping a fridge cool during a very hot summer outside requires a more powerful cooling system. Instead most people have a powerful AC since you want the house cool anyway, with a cheaper fridge cooling system
The reverse is also true. You wouldnt want your fridge to require a heater installed in it to keep your food from freezing in esspecially cold winters
Mucki said in winter.
To your second point, if I can deduce by the feddit.org that Mucki is in Germany, the winter outside temp will swing between -5° and +10°. The isolation of the fridge might be enough. But I sometimes put a stew or soup just outside on the balcony without a fridge.We have only very few days where we have extreme icecoldness around. It’s a moderate climate. I never monitored how much less power it uses outside than inside… But It stricked me that the cooling cycles are much shorter in winter after I had put it outside.
In Paris a lot of apartments had a cellar opening on the outside.
Like this one:
Unfortunately a lot of them have been removed since it’s much easier to have everything in the fridge at constant temperature and energy used to be cheap.
I see plenty of secondary fridges outside. Rust is an issue though.
You can get fridges made for outdoor use, but I guess those are more for people who are willing to spend the extra money on having an outdoor kitchen.
what a genius.
My house has hydronic heated wood floors. Warm water from the heater unit circulates through pipes under the floor, heating the room from the ground up. It rules. It’s quiet, even, and amazing in winter.
