Vent Refrigerators Outside

by george whitney | 1:30 pm August 7th, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Categories: Efficiency, Engineering

Electric Refrigerators, at least in suitable climes, should be vented outside in warm weather and use cold air from the outside in cold weather. To have refrigerator compressors laboring in extracting cold air from air we have paid to heat when the outside environment is often colder than the refrigerator seems like a waste of energy. Vented outside in hot weather and utilized in the refrigerator in cold weather seems to make sense to me. In warm weather we pay for cooling the air with an air conditioner and then the refrigerator pours the hot air from cooling the box into the house to raise the demand of the air conditioner. That also does not make sense excepting to those who benefit by selling electriciity.

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2 Responses to “Vent Refrigerators Outside”


  1. vent outside in summer and inside in winter. Like John commented it’s not so easy.
    You need an active vent that closes and opens when it runs. Yet vets heat inside in winter or any cold day and outside in summer when it’s hot.

    For sure never run a fridge or freezer in the garage or outside like many do. That is very inefficient. The soda pop machines outside are real losers. non healthy sugar filled emty calories and most are outside in the weather. A double loser.


  2. JSTACKS6, you forgot that on cold days, you should be able to just let in the cold air to do the cooling for you, rather than just trying to vent rejected heat out. You wouldn’t have to have much cooling at all if you started with the cold air mass from the outside.

    Refrigerators could definitely be better designed, problem is that its cheaper to pollute the planet and screw our kids than it have a paradigm shift.

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