I have a large chest freezer which is mostly empty. If I fill it with ice (bags or gallon jugs of frozen water) will it use less electricity? It is about 3 years old.
- posted
17 years ago
I have a large chest freezer which is mostly empty. If I fill it with ice (bags or gallon jugs of frozen water) will it use less electricity? It is about 3 years old.
No. And manual-defrost chest freezers tend to be very efficient, using half as much electricity as modern frostless refrigerator-freezers. It's possible your freezer costs only $25 a year to run. Consider filling it with milk when its on sale, taking care to remove at least
1/2 cup per gallon and purging the air to allow the containers to expand as the water turns to ice.
It will take some energy to chill water and get it down to temperature. Once that is done, there will be less air exchange when the door is opened so there will be some energy savings in the long run. In the event of a power loss, the thermal mass will keep things from thawing as rapidly also.
"jfcrn" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@homerepairlive.com:
Supposedly a full freezer is more efficient than an empty one. I had a large chest freezer and used bags of ice and soda bottles filled with water to fill up the space. It seemed to reduce the fluctuations in temp whenever the lid was opened. It also helped A LOT to keep the temp cold when the power would go out for hours at a time. I kept mine at -10F.
Dee
Fluctuations in temperature do not necessarily indicate fluctuations in power consumption. It takes much more energy to change the temperature of a given volume of water than of ice.
The usual recommendation is for 4F, but 0F can give 50-100% better storage life. I can't imagine how long food will last at -10F, but it may at least double the energy consumption
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