Isolating the freezer

[nearly NORMal]

Long time listener, first time caller.

Not sure if the following is possible but thought I would throw it out there.

I have a fridge freezer combo, the fridge i use for fermenting and the freezer is dead space never use it. Has anyone had any luck isolating the freezer and A) using a stc to regulate temp or B Just stopping it working so it could be used as a chamber. If B then i could use an stc and heat source and drill large some holes and get a small fan to allow some of the cool air from the fridge to enter to cool it and bung them up when needs be. The picture may help paint the picture.

 

[michaeld16]

most common case for fridge/freezers is the freezer gets cold and and a tstat allows a vent to open to let cold air into the fridge, so cant be isolated. much less common is when there are two seperate refrigeration circuits this could then be done. dunno what sort of fridge you have so cant tell if possible. freezer space is always handy for hop storage though.

 

[peekaboo_jones]

I'm in the same boat with my fridge freezer, bit the freezer doesn't get very cold and goes mouldy pretty quick.
Now I chock it ajar and let it ventilate. If it froze I would use it for hops etc... pain in the ass

 

[Bridgey23]

I use it to crash cool my yeast starters. Just don't forget about your starter if you crash cool the fridge.

 

[n87]

If you were to control the vent between the freezer and fridge, you may be able to....

How you would do this would depend on how the fridge is setup. if it is just an electrically controlled flap, you could bypass it and hook it up to your controller.

 

[nearly NORMal]

I cant seem to upload an image. It looks about 10 years old the fridge has a thin panel at the back for cooling, not sure how the freezer cools.

Hopefully they are seperate, and i could use a fan/vent to cool from fridge and belt to heat.

I might see if a sparky can investigate feels a little out of my league. Thanks for the input all.

 

[n87]

If its an old school fridge with the panel at the back, it is likely you are out of luck.
From my understanding, the same refrigerant runs through the freezer as the fridge, just more runs through the freezer to make it colder.

 

[chook79]

Haha, I logged in to ask the exact same question, great minds huh?

It just seems such a waste of energy; granted it's only on when the thermostat kicks in but when I'm cold crashing it's a bunch of electricity being chewed up for nothing.

Is it possible to cut a hole in the shelf between the freezer & fridge to put a cooling pipe of some sort, so that it would cool down quicker and at least the freezer wouldn't be on for as long?

Although conversely I guess that means it would then take twice as much heat to get back up to temp because now there's more area to heat up.

I feel your pain.

 

[Camo6]

Hardly worth the effort. Unless your fridge runs two compressors but I'm yet to own a fridge that does.
For the money you'd spend tinkering you could buy a 2nd hand all fridge or freezer off ebay and make use of the extra space.

 

[rude]

Plus 1 for all fridge

Brew 2 at once but bit hard too get same temp for both but close enough

 

[pablo_h]

Hardly worth the effort. Unless your fridge runs two compressors but I'm yet to own a fridge that does.
For the money you'd spend tinkering you could buy a 2nd hand all fridge or freezer off ebay and make use of the extra space.

Yeah this.
Often it is only the freezer that has any cooling at all or is the main cooling. F/F rely on left over capacity or refrigerant to cool the fridge part (old fridges), or just a fan blowing freezer air into the fridge (modern fridges).
Exceptions are recent electronic "twin cool" side by side fridges (which would flip their lid wanting to know why the freezer is warm, why it can't defrost etc and would just shut down in error), or as mentioned older side by side mechanical fridges that often had two compressors (think commercial or USA side by sides when that style first came out in the 70s/80s) E: but I don't think there's that many about in AU as we commonly had the pigeon pair set up, one complete stand alone upright freezer, one complete stand alone upright fridge , rather than the two compressor type thing they were doing in the US way back then. And after that electronics and variable speed fans made single compressor side by sides more viable.

 

[damoninja]

If the coil doesn't run through there, you could remove the panels and foam between the fridge and freezer to open it all up to a single chamber. You'd then have a bigger freezer.

Big IF however.

How cool does it actually get in there?

 

[nearly NORMal]

The freezer works well. The idea was to have a temp contolled environment for yeast starters.

http://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/brompton/fridges-freezers/fridge-freezer-fisher-paykel-250l-delivery-available-/1131120732

This is what it looks like, not my one by the way just found it on gumtree. I have a feezer on the keggerator so dont really need the space.

 

[pablo_h]

If that's the actual model, then going by the pictures it's a cyclic defrost system aka manual freezer defrost, non fan assisted etc, what ever you want to call it. All refrigerant goes through the freezer first, the whole freezer is lined with piping and can't be touched.
You can't modify that at all, can't remove any panels or anything else really.