Tips for Getting the Most from Your Refrigerator

Getting the most from your refrigerator is not just practical, it is pretty much necessary for enjoying modern day life. A refrigerator that is running at peak efficiency not only means that the food you eat is healthier, it also means that you can potentially save some pretty good money over the course of the life of the appliance. The lifetime of the typical refrigerator can be expected to extend over the course of two or three automobiles and probably a dozen or more cell phones.

Location, Location, Location

One of the reasons that your power bill may be so high is because your refrigerator is placed too close to your stove, oven or other heat supply. The warmer the air circulating around your refrigerator, the harder it has to work to keep cool. Since a constantly running refrigerator is one of the biggest consumers of power in your house, it only makes sense to take obvious steps to increase its efficiency. You may be limited by the space in which you can place a refrigerator in which case it may not be a such a bad idea to move down in size on your next purchase if it means being able to fit it farther away from any sources of heat.

Dust

The coils on the back of a refrigerator collects dust the way Elizabeth Taylor used to collect husbands. The thicker the buildup of dust on those coils, the less efficient it will work. Not only is it easy to forget about cleaning behind the refrigerator, it is easy to procrastinate once you do remember. If you hardly ever clean the coils back there, even two or three times a year is going to be an improvement.

Overfreezing

You may be wasting money as well as diminishing the quality of the food you eat in an attempt to ensure that food is properly frozen. The mathematical reality is that your refrigerator’s freezer need only maintain a temperature around 10 degrees to guarantee safety. Place a thermometer inside your freezer and if the reading is below 10 degrees, then adjust the freezer’s setting. The result will not only save energy, but reduce cases of freezer burn.

Evaporation

Evaporation of moisture inside a refrigerator actually increases the energy load on the unit. Since every little bit helps you to get the most from your refrigerator, you always take pains to secure any liquid you place inside your refrigerator with a sealed lid. Any liquid item from a soda to soup will experience some evaporation and should therefore be covered tightly to lessen the impact on the efficient use of energy by your refrigerator.

Shelving

Take the time to be precise and careful when loading items onto your refrigerator’s shelves. Efficient energy use relies on the ability of air to circulate as freely as possible around the items on those shelves. The more space you can create between items packed into your refrigerator, the cleaner it will operate. Equal distribution of items on the shelves would seem to be the ideal, but it’s more complicated than that. Shelves situated higher inside your refrigerator need to allow better air circulation than lower shelves. Therefore, peak efficiency would actually be experienced by packing the bottom shelf with more items than you place on the top shelf.

Keep Hot Foods Out

You can also get the best of your refrigerator by keeping the temperature down and this means letting foods cool down before you place them into the unit. Give hot food time enough to cool down to room temperature before refrigeration. Refrigerators use enough energy just keeping cool food cold, don’t increase the load by unnecessarily making it cool down hot foods.