> not a fair comparison. Most likely the door of the old one was not sealing well, hence the continuous running and frost buildup

That's an expected cost of old fridges, so I don't know that it's unfair. A major reason old machines are less efficient is accumulated defects (people too!). If I said comparing a new car's fuel efficiency to my old one was unfair, because my old one has a lot of problems, you might say that's very fair.

> I have a late 30s Frigidaire that I restored a few years ago

Did I read that right with 30s, as in 1930s?

Honestly given how many compromises there are in refrigerants sold now, it wouldn't surprise me with new seals and a good compressor motor if the old stuff did better.

Yeah, the title is misleading. The article says that one of the compressors on the old one was running constantly - if you applied the same failure mode to the new refrigerator, the difference would be significantly less.

Save us dang

It's still functional though, the point is comparing 'keep running the old tired one' vs 'replace with new', not 'how well were they made then vs now'.

Indeed, been there. Just getting the dishwasher out of its cubby hole is a major effort, and involves dealing with not just the wiring but the hoses too. And if it's an older house, chances are good that the dishwasher had to be crammed in with a certain amount of hacking, cussing, and persuasion.

The fridge rolls out into the room on its own wheels.

I just replaced the drain pump and motherboard on my GE dishwasher and it was super easy. Everything was easy to access and all the major parts had a QR code on them making parts lookup idiot proof.

When the parts showed up they came with all the clamps and other replacement hardware that I didn’t even know I needed.

I've found cheap after-market thermostats to have short lifetimes... Original lasted 20 years... Replacement started misbehaving in just 2 years.

So now my policy is to retrofit all old refrigerators with digital STC-1000 thermostats. A bit more work to cut out some plastic, split the hot wire and tap into a neutral wire (easy enough to follow the bulb) but cheaper, super reliable, and gives very consistent and highly controllable results.

Two such upgraded refrigerators are still working without an issue several years later. Though both required replacing the relay (with a solid state relay/capacitor unit) at about the same time, and one after replacement of the evaporator fan motor due to noise issues.

I've found US dishwashers pretty easy to fix, but Korean and German ones can be a bit more of a pain, and these are the ones built for the US market. I've heard that European models often have water softeners built in.

Also: if you find ice forming in your fridge, or uneven cooling inside, it may be due to a clogged drain tube. This was the root cause of my fridge breaking: tube in the back clogged -> condensation backed up around the evaporator coils -> froze solid -> blocked circulation fan -> incorrect thermal readings, warm/frozen spots in fridge.

It takes a long time getting to know your dishwasher but my 2014 model was actually not that hard to debug and fix. Need to be able to source the parts of course. I was surprised how repairable it was. Will watch out for it when I need to buy another one.

Depends. My last fridge the thermostat went bad and it couldn’t be fixed because they embedded the entire thing into the foam. Terrible design. Was a whirlpool.

Electric bills aren't calculated by the Watt, you pay per kWh. The expected cost of running the fridge is the salient information.

I've had this thought before, when seeing labels that talk about kWh/day. The answer is very simple: you pay per kWh. When people want to know power efficiency, what they really want to know is "how much will this cost me to run?". That answer is most easily expressed in kWh per unit time.

Although this is totally informal, in a normal conversation if somebody gives me the wattage of a device, I assume they are peak power draw. For kWh/day, I assume they’ve accounted for some reasonable duty-factor.

Possibly because it gives better intuition for the approximate cost per unit of time. Similar to how fuel consumption can be written as volume/length = area, but is still usually presented in the former way, since that shows the actual amount of resource being consumed.

Because that's not what they're interested in! Really what they care about is that the fridge is consuming about 9.36 MJ/day, because really kWh is just a convenience unit for joules. But since everyone gets charged in kWh that's the unit they use.

Because the most familiar anchor for scale is the monthly meter reading, which is in kWh.

I thought watt is a DC unit, so often avoided for AC measurements, since it is ambiguous which watt you are talking about, and the device is always consuming more or less than the average, and very rarely consuming that actual amount. Often the alternate unit is called VA, even though that too seems like a watt

It is bit too derived unit. But on other hand it does make calculations pretty simple. Say 0.14 per kWh and then cost in month is simple multiplication 2.6300.14 . Or a year is 2.63650.14...

Watts measure power, kWh measure energy - and they are a more convenient unit than J.

Todays appliances are built, by design, to break fast these days. So whether old (operating costs) or new (foreshortened lifespan) your appliances cost you more.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/modern-appliances...

(https://ghostarchive.org/archive/KGf2Z)

Related item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32462954

The author is in Estonia. Appliances in the European Union have different energy standards and labels, and run on different voltages, so you don’t ever see Energy Star fridges there.

Estonia joined the EU in 2004, and I don’t know what the energy labelling on appliances was like before then.

The ambient temperature differential between the kitchen and other rooms in a house is minimal on average. There’s nothing bonkers about putting the refrigerator in that space. Even a hypothetical 20F temperature rise during an hour long cooking session is basically negligible for the efficiency of a refrigerator that is cooling 24/7.

Putting the refrigerator in an unconditioned space wouldn’t be as big of a win as you think because every time you open the door to the unconditioned space you’re letting cold air into the house. Twice per refrigerator visit all day long adds up.

In the winter you actually benefit from having the refrigerator in your conditioned space because the waste heat goes toward heating your house. It would be lose-lose to put it outside of the house in a cold location.

I Suppose heating fuel is cheaper, or household heat pumps are more efficient, but all of the energy consumed by running the refrigerator becomes waste heat in the same room you are trying to heat. That seems superior to the refrigerator heating a room where the waste heat isn’t useful.

> kept in a fresh and dry storage I ask myself where the eff should I store it

Your mountain home. (I'd hazard a guess that many such products come from the interior versus humid coasts.)

Where do you store your wine? (Only half kidding, but I am sure you have solutions like this in Spain)

The fridge box is fairly insulated. Temps in my home are consistent all over plus or minus a couple degrees. I think you've overstating the case a lot here. Even with the oven running it doesnt seem to affect the fridge too much. Heck in a lot of warmer climates people leave a spare fridge outside where its battling non-climate controlled air.

In the winter your fridge's waste heat is warming up your kitchen, so if anything, its a bit of a bonus those months.

The only thing I think we could do with fridges is put in a system that pulls cold air in during the winter but that's sawing holes into brick and yet another thing to worry about in regards to mold, critters, moisture, filters, fans, etc. Its just not worth the effort or cost.

My assumption, probably pretty close to the new fridge.

Very little has changed in fridge tech in 30 years besides them getting cheaper and breaking easier.

My delivered cost of electricity went up about 50% per kWh in the last few months and is therefore 3x what you mention and likely only going higher.

[AI driven] data center power consumption is real and as of right now, it seems like other consumers are subsidizing it.

Electricity prices varies a LOT depending where in the world you are: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...

And if you didn't live in a place where it's cheap?

From a link in TFA: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2024/05/02/smartplugs/

Poor people can make their own decisions about whether to use an old fridge or not. They know much more about their own situation than you do. You are not well situated to make these sorts of decisions for them.

From the article:

> as a stopgap until they get further with renovation work

I assume they know what they are getting into.

It would be interesting to hear your comparison to counterarguments to this. Can you explain why these arguments are more important?

As another person has noted, this wasn't quite the scenario - they had renovations, but you know that now.

I had to renovate a kitchen a while ago and I got into the habit of living without a fridge or a freezer. It came as a surprise that this was possible, and the article is interesting because I now know how much money is saved. I can compare this to food wasted due to a lack of refrigeration, and, I am still seeing the advantages of no fridge. Such heresy!

It depends on what you eat, but I don't have time for most things that need to go in the fridge. If it isn't in the fridge at the supermarket then it doesn't need to be in the fridge at home is the general rule. Oddly I have lower food waste with no fridge, but there are annoyances such as not being able to buy a big bag of (say) carrots, and having to resupply twice a week. On the whole though, my food is a lot fresher than when I had a fridge, plus I have upped my nutrition game to not have this food morgue of things that 'want to kill me'. I joke, but there were a lot of ready meals, sticky puddings and much else that might as well been 'raw trans fats'. I went from this to a jute bag, which seems to keep most vegetables fresh enough for long enough.

What is also interesting about fridges is how quickly they turn into some cave of mold even if they are kept nice and clean. Turn that electricity off, take everything out, and, unless you keep the door open, some true horrors will be found in there a week later.

In the article this was not a like for like efficiency test by any stretch of the imagination. Over time it is the door seal that goes and, if that isn't tight then it will just be sucking moisture out of the air to make a huge ice block, hence compressor on the whole time.

The next problem is that some fridges have vents with fans in them, sometimes forward facing at the base. These get to collect lots of dust, hair and other debris, making them ineffective.

Despite these test methodology issues, in the real world people will be replacing an old fridge that has a dodgy seal with a new fridge that works as the manufacturer intended.

Regarding your point of the poor, do you have any idea how many people in the UK do not have a fridge, or access to one? Allegedly it is in the millions, which I find hard to believe, but have not dismissed out of hand. There are so many people living in sub-standard rented accommodation in a shoebox sized 'studio flat' (or worse). Proper housing is required before these people can get a fridge. The UK is allegedly a first world country, but with huge inequalities when it comes to property and income.

I suspect that in much of the world not having a fridge is no big deal, if you are living off the land rather than processed foods and processed animal products then why would no fridge be hardship?

It is amazing how many assumptions there are regarding fridges, the need for them and whether life is 'disadvantaged' without one. Until relatively recent times nobody had fridges yet we somehow survived, albeit with some mortality issues.

Personal pet level is that it’s so hard to get information on the noise level of appliances.

We’ve recently moved, and our new house’s crawl space has a Santa Fe dehumidifier in it that seems SO LOUD at night. I don’t think it’s broken - it’s just a compressor and fan with no engineering put into keeping them quiet. If I could get one that was as efficient and well built, but I knew would be quiet, I’d replace it in a heartbeat - but manufacturers don’t advertise noise levels.

Surely I can’t be the only one who’d pay substantially more for an appliance that was guaranteed to be quiet?

The newer compressors are smaller so they cost less, but are run faster to pump at the same rate. Many old hermetic compressors used a 4-pole 1500/1800RPM motor, then they became a 2-pole 3000/3600RPM, and the newest VFD/inverter motors can go even faster.

I would try plugging a simple induction motor into the refrigerator circuit to see if it also makes a weird noise. It's possible you have a problem with the wiring itself (loose neutral, etc.).

I've never had issues with HF noise out of a refrigerator. It's always been the opposite kind of noise that has been a problem.

My Miele hums with so low frequency that it sounds like a truck is passing by.