Amory and Hunter Lovins: Spokespersons for a Sustainable-energy Future
(Page 3 of 15)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
Over the years, the manufacturers have also been trying to make the inside of the refrigerator bigger without making the outside bigger. (Given time, I suppose they would have had the inside bigger than the outside.) What they did, of course, was to skimp on the insulation, so outside heat comes straight in through the walls. They also designed the refrigerator so that when you open the door, the cold air falls out and the refrigerator frosts up inside. Most refrigerators therefore have electric heaters inside them which go on now and then to melt the frost. Many also have electric strip heaters around the door to keep the gaskets from sticking. Some even have electric heaters in their outer skin to keep humidity from condensing on it!
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. . . ENERGY FLASHES...... ENERGY FLASHES...... ENERGY FLASHES. . . September/October 1982 POPEYE W...
You can try if you like, but it's hard to come up with a dumber way of using electricity. Yet if you don't use electric water heaters or space heaters, refrigerators are probably the biggest single part of your household electric bill. Nationally, they use the equivalent of about half the output of all nuclear power plants.
Fortunately, there are smarter ways to build refrigerators. Consider how many kilowatt-hours it takes, for example, to run a typical refrigerator for one year. From 1950 to 1975 that electric demand nearly trebled to 1,800 kilowatt-hours per year. Then in 1976 California passed a law saying that you couldn't sell a refrigerator there that used more than about 1,400. Within four years, virtually every refrigerator on the market met that standard, and the best — by Amana — did a third better. Meanwhile, the government was told by consultants that better motors, insulation, gaskets, and so on, could reduce the demand to 650 kilowatt-hours per year. Sure enough, by 1981 a typical machine on the Japanese market used only 700, and Toshiba's best used only 550. The consultants now went back to the drawing board and concluded that by pulling out all the stops they could get it down to about 420; but a Danish engineer showed that 260 would be highly cost-effective. Upsetting all these theoretical estimates, a California engineering designer — Larry Schlussler — built a refrigerator in 1979 that used 288 kilowatt-hours per year; he is currently selling a handmade model that uses 175; he built a prototype in 1982 that used only 64; and his 1984 prototype uses 15. Furthermore, the passive refrigerator we're building into our zero-energy house in the Colorado Rockies will use only about half a kilowatt — hour per year-to run the light that goes on when you open the door!
ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND RENEWABLES
As the parable of the refrigerator illustrates, we're in the position of someone who can't keep the bathtub full of hot water because the water keeps flowing out. People are still trying to sell us bigger water heaters when what we most need is a plug. And there have been some very clever plugs invented lately.
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