Midland Spinner
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Do I really need a new fridge?I have an old fridge (about 18 years old). Currently accepted wisdom is that I “should” replace it with a new A+ graded model because this will use less energy.
But – I want to know how much energy & resources will be used in the manufacture, advertising & transport of the new fridge, and the transport & recycling of the old one, and how long it will take for the reduced energy consumption of the new fridge to balance out the energy used in making the new one & recycling the old one?
Am I really an eco-criminal for keeping my old fridge, or am I actually doing the right thing because in the time I’ve had my fridge, my neighbours’ house has had at least three different ones, each with its own embodied energy.
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jema
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I'd be amazed if the math made it make sense to change the Fridge.
It's different with say a boiler where it does make sense.
We really need somewhere where you can see the figures though 
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JB
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My brother recently changed his freezer but only after running a power monitor on the old one and discovering just how much power it wasted. A modern fridge might use 200KWh a year or about £25 - £30 of electricity. If you have an 18 year old fridge it could be costing three or four times that. So changing it might pay for itself in three years or so and from a purely financial point of view be worth doing. If you really want to know if it's worth it then get one of those power monitor things, see how much power your current fridge uses and then do the numbers.
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leggy
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but would the new fridge last 3 years 
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vegplot
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It would make economic sense in the long run. The fridge will be recycled and you'll have lower energy consumption costs (assuming you replace with a high efficiency low energy model)
Also, consider the old fridge may contains CFC's.
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JB
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| vegplot wrote: | | Also, consider the old fridge may contains CFC's. |
But replacing the fridge won't have prevent those CFCs being released or removed correctly in future so that's not a reason to replace a fridge now. (ie if the damage has already been done then you may as well carry on)
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vegplot
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| JB wrote: | | vegplot wrote: | | Also, consider the old fridge may contains CFC's. |
But replacing the fridge won't have prevent those CFCs being released or removed correctly in future so that's not a reason to replace a fridge now. (ie if the damage has already been done then you may as well carry on) |
They are disposed of properly if taken to a recycling station. If you have a refrigerant leak in an old fridge you'll be pumping out CFC's. Better to have it 'put down' properly to avoid this happening.
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JB
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| vegplot wrote: | | They are disposed of properly if taken to a recycling station. If you have a refrigerant leak in an old fridge you'll be pumping out CFC's. Better to have it 'put down' properly to avoid this happening. |
Do they tend to leak? I would have thought a refrigerant leak would have been a total failure of the fridge, hence the reason I thought it was unlikely.
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marigold
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Some friends had this dilemma a while ago, it was solved when the 20+ year old fridge/freezer died of natural causes and they had to replace it anyway. Ponder long enough and the problem will solve itself...  .
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Lorrainelovesplants
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We got a fridge on freecycle about 2 months ago.
We needed a second fridge for me to keep my eggs in (only eggs), and it had to be reasonably new, so we went on freecycle with the aim to get a reasonable one. Our existing fridge could then be used for the eggs, and the freecycle one we'd use.
A lovely couple in wadebridge offered us theirs.
When we went to collect it, it was sparkling! Less than 2 months old, and they were replacing it because they had just bought a new kitchen from Ikea and the white goods were all included!
2month old fridge! Clean as if they'd never used it!
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cab
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| jema wrote: |
We really need somewhere where you can see the figures though |
I'm sure we discussed this yonks back, but is there a way you can create a simple database for facts and figures like this, something searchable and useful for calculations? A sort of downsizer facts and figures wiki/database?
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vegplot
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| JB wrote: | | vegplot wrote: | | They are disposed of properly if taken to a recycling station. If you have a refrigerant leak in an old fridge you'll be pumping out CFC's. Better to have it 'put down' properly to avoid this happening. |
Do they tend to leak? I would have thought a refrigerant leak would have been a total failure of the fridge, hence the reason I thought it was unlikely. |
It's 18 years old and therefore as time goes by the risk becomes greater. Combine this with a lower energy consumption of a new fridge it makes sense to do this before the old fridge fails.
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vegplot
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| Lorrainelovesplants wrote: | We got a fridge on freecycle about 2 months ago.
We needed a second fridge for me to keep my eggs in (only eggs), and it had to be reasonably new, so we went on freecycle with the aim to get a reasonable one. Our existing fridge could then be used for the eggs, and the freecycle one we'd use.
A lovely couple in wadebridge offered us theirs.
When we went to collect it, it was sparkling! Less than 2 months old, and they were replacing it because they had just bought a new kitchen from Ikea and the white goods were all included!
2month old fridge! Clean as if they'd never used it! |
Doesn't that dehydrate them?
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Lorrainelovesplants
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No, according to the CIEH Food Safety course I did yesterday, eggs are best stored in chilled conditions, between 0 and 5 degrees. This prevents any bacterial growth.
(Best practice).
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JB
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| Lorrainelovesplants wrote: | No, according to the CIEH Food Safety course I did yesterday, eggs are best stored in chilled conditions, between 0 and 5 degrees. This prevents any bacterial growth.
(Best practice). |
So why do shops not bother with chilled storage for eggs?
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stumbling goat
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the new fridge is in the shop anyway. so you are not an eco murderer in that regard.
the cost of disposal of your old fridge can be minimised if you take it by non powered transport, an already owned wheelbarrow or sack barrow, it would be counter productive to have to go and buy a new one. if too heavy and ypu do not have a sack barrow you could dismantle it and take it part by part to the recycling plant. depends how earnest you are in being ecopositive.
but why get rid of it? just because it is uneconomic to run or not ecoefficient enough for your tastes does not mean it has no use to you at all. you could use it as a cupboard or as some form of air tight storage. reuse it.
z0
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cassy
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Does anyone know of a way to make fridges/freezers safe at home, or do you have to take it somewhere? I'm particularly thinking about the CFCs or other gasses, rather than the electrics.
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vegplot
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| stumbling goat wrote: | | reuse it.z0 |
How do you ensure you won't leak CFC's? Fridges make great air tight cupboards for storing feed but they do get abused and knocked aorund.
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Pilsbury
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| JB wrote: | | Lorrainelovesplants wrote: | No, according to the CIEH Food Safety course I did yesterday, eggs are best stored in chilled conditions, between 0 and 5 degrees. This prevents any bacterial growth.
(Best practice). |
So why do shops not bother with chilled storage for eggs? |
Because chilled storage is only best practice, not law therefore there is no legal requirement to chill them so shops wont bother, its cheaper to just stack them on the shelves.
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stumbling goat
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if you reuse it for another purpose you may also consider the need for making it safe so that children can not get trapped in it if playing.
as for cfc escape, would your local authority environmental health department be able to assist you with that question?
good luck
d4
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Midland Spinner
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Thanks for all your input people, it’s been thought provoking to read the various replies.
To recap on the opinions so far:
Economically it probably makes sense in the long term to upgrade my fridge*, but to find out I’d have to get an energy monitor – say £20-30, but I might save myself £25-50 per year so it would pay for itself in about 2 - 3 years. (A new fridge will cost me at least £107 (cheapest I could find on a quick google), but that one probably won’t last long enough to pay back its energy debt to the planet.) But I knew that anyway – my dilemma is whether it’s environmentally worth it.
* The budget is stretched fairly tight at the moment, but IF it was worth it to the environment as well we might take the plunge and do without something else for a few months to scrape the money up, but if it’s environmentally wrong to replace it, then hey, money for food is good, but the occasional beer is nice too.
I did find a blog where someone had calculated the embodied energy of a generic fridge and worked out that it would take 3.5 years for the fridge to save that amount of energy, but it was based on fag-packet calculations and estimated figures (turns out the industry don’t give out details of the energy used to manufacture fridges...no surprise there!). But then it turned out that he’d made a mistake in the maths and is no longer sure of his figures, so after reading three pages of maths, he ends by saying “don’t rely on these figures...” So I’m no further forward on that question, I didn’t bother noting down the url because frankly why should you lot have to wade through three pages to get to the disclaimer at the end as well.
My fridge might contain CFCs (although I seem to remember that we paid more at the time to get one which didn’t, although I can’t find the paperwork, so maybe that’s wishful thinking). If it does contain CFCs they might leak out, which I hadn’t thought of before. It’s working OK at the minute (stops to touch wood) so I guess that that indicates that it has a fair amount of the refrigerant fluid still in place. Disposing of the fridge increases the chance that the CFCs will leak out during disposal.
If I decide to replace it I could try to re-use it here – no children to worry about getting trapped in it, but also limited space for derelict white goods, and anyway I’d have to safely dispose of the refrigerant first. Can’t use it as a cupboard because there’s no space, don’t want it in the garden (ditto), so could take it to the local “household recycling site” that’s three miles away, up hill, I think that it might fit on my bike trailer size-wise, but would probably be over the SWL, and anyway the roads are scary enough without emulating Tony Hawkes (“Around Ireland with a Fridge”). So there would be some fossil fuel involved in transport. I don’t know if the council would charge me for the disposal.
So to sum up: I still don’t know if I should or not. But it’s getting gradually noisier over the passage of time, so I guess that Marigold will have the last say.
| marigold wrote: | | Ponder long enough and the problem will solve itself... . |
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