Save Energy: Open The Fridge 10,000 Times Less A Year

So, like I said in the introduction post, some of the posts will be slightly “off the wall”, just meaning there is no technology involved – just things that you might walk past a hundred times a day and not realise they can reduce energy and waste, and also save you some money.

So to start with, I thought I’d choose something really off the wall, normally posts won’t be as simplified as this one.

I will also try to show some realistic savings whenever I can, but sometimes like this post, I won’t be able to make an estimate reasonable enough that I’d want to stick my neck out for it. If you think you can calculate the cost savings, then you are more than welcome to try and make a comment below so that we can all read about it.

A bit of background… I am what you might term as a deep-thinker – just plain ol’ nuts in some respects. But I often ponder things that are quite abstract. By that, I mean things that perhaps half the population may never think of, and the other half would never want to think of. This idea was one of the things of I thought about over a year ago, and have been doing it ever since.

So, Energy Saving Milk Jugs, what are they?

It’s more of a statement of fact, if you think about it, how many times a day do you go to the fridge and open the door to get a bottle of milk out for a cup of tea, or coffee, or cereal etc etc.

I tend to work from home quite regularly, if I’m not out and about, which these days I don’t tend to be, I’m either at the office or at home working there. So if you take an average week day (Mon-Fri) in our house, the fridge door can be opened something like this:

=4: 4 kids each will do cereal prior to school, normally one after another after the first battle of the day (for the bathroom)
=6: At least two hot drinks will be made so that’s another +2 fridge door openings
=7: Someone will have toast so out comes the butter (can’t do anything about that one)
=8: Me or her indoors does the school run and the other one will have a drink ready for the other’s return
=11: Minimum another 3 cups of tea before lunch
=12: Lunch made, butter out and maybe something to throw on a sandwich
=15: Minimum another 3 cups of tea before fetching kids from school
=16: Another cup of tea after fetching kids
=20: Minumum another 4 cups of tea or coffee prior to dinner
=22: Fridge opened at least a couple of times whilst making dinner
=24: Normally another couple of drinks prior to bed, sometimes one of the kids will eat cereal for supper or have a drink of milk

Now this is the number of times that you open the fridge to get something out, but most times you also need to put something back into the fridge when you’ve used it. If the milk is used up, for example, then you don’t open the fridge to put it back but you have got to open the fridge to put the new bottle in so we’ll say you can safely double the tally above.

That makes: 48 times in an average day that the fridge door is opened in our house, so during the course of a week that makes 336 times, and so on, like this:

Daily: 48
Weekly: 336
Monthly: 1,440 (using a 30 day month)
Annually: 17,520 (over 365 days)

Why opening the fridge door costs money

Every time you open the fridge door, the warm air from the room will enter into the cold fridge so when you close the door the fridge then needs to chill that warm air that you just let in.

Even worse, if you took out the milk and left the fridge door open whilst you made the cup of tea before putting the milk back and closing the door – shame on you – and you would be horrified if you realised how much electric you are burning unnecessarily by doing that.

When you leave the door open to the fridge, well it [the fridge] doesn’t know that the door is open so it tries to make the whole room cold and suddenly kicks into cooling mode to try and cool down the whole kitchen, or worse, the whole outside of England if your fridge is in the garage.

Simple cost free energy saving solutions

So, I was thinking about this and even though I couldn’t quantify how much money I could save by just having a milk jug – I knew it must be tons of money (at least compared to the cost of the jug). If you think that milk is pence to buy, but you have to buy it anyway, then why add more pence to it in electricity (which incidentally was going to be the alternative title to this blog post – Electric Milk)

Open your fridge 10,000 times less a year

Out of the original daily trips to the fridge I estimated that I could save about 30 fridge door openings per day, or 10,950 per year. Now a Milk jug costs about £2.99 at Sainsbury’s (or any other supermarket).

So, does £2.99 spent on a jug pay for itself? By my reckoning it must pay for itself within a few short weeks, or about 2,737 fridge openings – that is my pure assumption.

If someone with a good maths brain would care to try and figure it out, I’d love to hear from you and I’m sure many others would too.

Some additional ways to reduce fridge energy consumption

There are a number of other ways to reduce the cost of energy consumption with your fridge, and you if read between the lines and get into the right mindset you can apply this thought process to almost every other appliance in your home.

Here are some other ways to save money with your fridge alone, I will publish a later post to try and summarise some all round savings that apply to other appliances and other energy consuming products in the home.

Ensure there is a good gap around the cooling system at the back of your fridge. Your fridge relies on good air circulation around the cooling system to be efficient, when you restrict the gap around the fridge you can drastically reduce the energy efficiency, even if you have the latest A+ rated appliance.
Try not to keep the fridge empty, when the fridge is empty and you open the door there is more space for warm air to go into the fridge. If your fridge is full you can significantly reduce the effect that opening the fridge door has on additional energy consumption.
Put things back into the fridge as soon as you are finished with them, leaving things out of the fridge allows them to warm up. When you put them back into the fridge it then needs to cool it back down to the correct temperature, which a 6 pint bottle of milk will consume a lot of energy to cool back down from room temperature, but if you buy a milk jug then you’ll only need to open it once or twice all day.
Position your fridge away from other heat sources, if your fridge is near your oven it will certainly consume a lot more energy than if it were positioned in the coolest place in the kitchen. That also goes for radiators which should never be near a fridge. If you have underfloor heating you should insulate the base of the fridge from the floor with a reflective mat, this will pay for itself in next to no time.
Position your fridge away from direct sunlight, i.e. windows/doors. A process known as solar gain is where the heat from sunlight is amplified through glass, think of a south facing conservatory and how warm they get right from first light in the morning.
Consider installing air conditioning, especially if you live mainly in one room. During the cold months you will still use your central heating unless you have a central air conditioning system which is without doubt the best energy saving investment you will ever make at home, on a par with any other heat pump technology.
If your fridge has an ice maker, and particularly if you don’t use it, then have it disconnected. It is much more economical to buy a bag of ice and keep it in the freezer. In some light research I did around the internet the consensus seems to indicate that this increases your fridge energy consumption by at least 10% (WOW! that’s a lot). From what I read, even if you don’t use the ice maker it still consumes power! Perhaps this does not apply to every model, but it is worth noting and finding out about your model.
Auto defrost fridges, these are something of a grey area, whilst it is certain that a frosted up fridge consumes a lot more energy, as much as 20% by all accounts, the auto-defrosting functions also consume additional power. I suppose you need to weigh this up against all of the other information in this list here, and if you are doing most of them then at least you have minimised the additional waste. Frosted up fridges/freezers consume more energy due to the fact that the frosted up ice needs to be kept frozen but it also acts as an insulator between the fridge and the contents inside, therefore causing additional chilling to be required. 20% is a heck of a lot of energy, just this one factor equates to you running your fridge for an extra 1½ days a week (in theory 8½ days per week) – think about that.
Upright freezers are by default less efficient, if you don’t need a half and half fridge/freezer and you have room for a chest freezer then you should opt for one. Modern uprights are in fact a great improvement on older models, but the fact is that opening the door chews up energy like a kid with candy-floss – it’s gone in a voosh! Chest freezers are less prone to this effect.
An empty freezer will eat more money than a plague of locusts, this offender has more ASBO’s than that kid in your street. Never ever leave a freezer empty because cold air escapes instantly upon opening the door. Even if you don’t keep the fridge full of normal food stuffs, then keep it full of bread, or even bags of newspaper, seriously. Bread is cheap, freezes brilliantly and lasts a while in the freezer. When you open the door, bread isn’t likely to jump out to make way for warm air, and this makes a big difference to the energy savings you will easily reap. If you take a large item out of the freezer and it’s likely to be a few days before you restock it, then get a carrier bag full of scrunched up newspaper and pop it in the gap, you can even do the “here’s one I made earlier” with this.

In a later post I will go into a bit more detail on the things to consider when you are looking to purchase a new fridge or freezer, that will save you money from the day you plug it in.

Here is a good link to give you some idea of how much energy your appliances use, it’s a USA site so you will need to do some simple math in your head, but it gives you a good insight into energy conusumption.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, your take on this post and if you were surprised by some of the information?

All comments here are do-it-yourself, contribute by knocking one in below.