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by Sierra Club Member Frank R. Leslie
Radio Shack is running a $29.95 special on the Kill-a-Watt meter. While
I have two wattmeters, I couldn't measure energy until buying this. Since it has 'time since plugged in' as well, dividing energy by time yields the average power for cycling refrigerators.
So, I checked our big frost-free refrigerator for nearly a day. P=194W
average over ~23 hours. It has a dust-sucking intake below the doors,
so I thought it might be useful to clean it. I married into it, and my
wife said it might not have been cleaned for ten years. Sure enough, the
nearly horizontal coils were 70% covered with a layer of dust perhaps
1/10 inch thick. Some vacuum work, and it's now back for a second run. With only a short sample of an hour, the average power was 132W or 22% less. The value will look more robust after a day.
So doing the specious newspaper reporter calculator work, 62 W average times 8766 hours per average year yields 543 kWh savings for one fridge(an oblique reference to Frigidaire) times ~200 million refrigerators in the USA yields 108600 MW-hours saved. Our marginal electricity rate is about $.07/kWh, so this savings is worth $38. For a half hour effort, I made $76/hour, better than I did as an engineer. Of course, maybe only our refrigerator needed cleaning (;->
So reminding our members and the public that cleaning the coils will increase efficiency and cost less money might help. After all, it's also a "personal virtue"!
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