Fridge Power consumption

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Hi all,

I'm a little nervous and need some words of wisdom, I got a free fridge and took it down to the garage that I rent for brewing, plugged it into a power meter so that I can reimburse the owner for usage. When I checked today it was saying the usage was 41 KwH. The fridge was running and I am worried that it may have been running full steam for the entire time. Is it possible that it has used all this power? I really don't need a $1200+ bill. Is this possible????

Cheers.

Ps. It's not a big fridge, can squeeze two corny kegs in above the hump + freezer section.
 
Thanks Yob, greatly appreciate your feed back.

I'll bother QLDKev :)

Cheers,
Richard

Ps. Sorry to hear about your loss and i'll be placing some decent orders soon.
 
Medium household fridges by memory have about a 120 W compressor on them. That's 0.12kWh per hour if it were running flat out all the time.
As a guess, a fridge might turn on 10 mins every hour, or 17% of the time.

So 0.12 x 0.17 = 0.0204 kWh every hour average consumption.

For a quarterly period of 90 days - 2160 h x 0.0204 kWh / h = 44 kWh

So your number makes sense if my maths does. I'd say your fridge is ok.
 
Thanks TheWiggman,

The fridge has only been plugged in for about 3 weeks. I think it might be running the whole time, so time for a new fridge.

Thanks again.
 
44kwh isn't that many really. It's about $11 at 25c per kW/h.

For a $1200 bill, you'd have to have used 4800 kW/h.
 
Also Wiggmans calcs are for a household use fridge, eg, 4' set temp and the door being opened several times a day. If you are using it as a fermentation chamber with a temp controller, you won't be driving it that cold and wont be opening the door very often, therefore less power consumption.
My 420 L all fridge has a rated power consumption of 360 kwh per annum, (don't know how Westinghouse arrives at this figure) which @ 26.73ckwh is $96.23 per year to operated as a household fridge.
 
Some great advice above.

Here's the thread Yob mentioned about, where I monitored a lot of usage at my place.

To see how good/bad your fridge is, we can compare it to a new fridge/freezer which is the perfect world.
Using a new fridge as a basis, a Westinghouse 340L
From that page they rate it at 412 KWhr/yr
412 / 52 (weeks in yr) = 7.9 KWhr/week

So for a 3 week test
New Westinghouse 24 KWhr
Your one used 44 KWhr. (My modern 618L double door with icemaker etc uses less than that)

As mentioned above power is approx 25c per KWhr
So your one 44 over 3 weeks is 44/3*52 = 762 per year, * $0.25 = $190
That new Westinghouse is 412 per year * $0.25 = $103


Is it a really hot shed? Was the fridge empty? They dont like being empty. Did you initially stock it with warm products that it had to cool? Have you checked the seals? They can make a huge difference to the running cost.

I would check the seals, etc and then keep the test running to see if the average comes down. But at the moment it seems to be high, but not a $1200 bill.
 
Thanks Guys,

I have to admit that when I first looked at the cost of Kwh on my phone I didn't see that it was c's and thought it was $ :( Feel like an idiot.

I put two Cornies in the fridge and only opened the door a couple of times over the few weeks. The garage is pretty warm when the sun is out, which hasn't been that much lately.

The fridge seems to be in pretty good condition and the seals all look good. I'm heading down today to do the final plumbing on my new rig and a water run, so I'll monitor over the day. Fingers crossed I'll be brewing tomorrow.

Thanks again guys and have a fantastic weekend.
 
I did experiments on my fridge too, involving adding 1/2" insulation around outside and adding a fan to the outside coils and fan to the inside as well. Results were very good from memory!

Here is the thread
 

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