Stop appliance genocide
 

I can no longer remain silent about this heinous baloney.
Our classic 50's refrigerators are being slandered in a most despicable way.
First it was the compact fluorescent lamps, now its refrigerators. The misinformation campaigns by these silly energy consulting-marketers is more than I can take!!!!!

The Kelvinator was made by NASH in DETROIT and uses LESS than a new one does!

Here are my experiences measuring actual energy consumption of FOUR refrigerators using a kilowatt-hour meter at my premises.
Both classic fridges are in a garage and summer kitchen and opened regularly over 2 months of blistering heat last summer.

Westinghouse 1947 - inside freezer box - 0.6 kilowatthours/day
Kelvinator 1953? - top freezer - 1.3 kilowatthours/day

GE 18cf 1985-top freezer - 2.3 kilowatthours/day (basement- AC)
Whirlpool 18cf 1997-top freezer - 2.4 kilowatthours/day (kitchen- AC)

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If they told you the older ones use less energy, they wouldn't sell too many new ones. My sony LCD uses 300 watts of power about the same as a roundie color set. Not much savings there. The Sony is always consuming energy while plugged in and the old sets do not. People will believe almost anything they're told.

AND THEY STILL LIVE...Imagine an appliance mfger building a fridge today to postwar standards...They'd be bankrupt in a year...

i agree totaly alot of the older appliances run better use less power last longer ,unlike there modern counter part .there is also another fact that they fail to mention the older stuff when it is turned off is off the newer computerized appliances never turn off totaly there is always a ghost load to keep memory , other stuff just looks off its still almost fully on .for the last 5 yrs i have been adpt. solar panels to my house my way not to share with my local power comp. that will not pay if the meter is turning backwards they say they will only give a credit.

How dare you use data do show what is actually green! :D

-J

I posted before, the local electric co-op ran a contest a year or so ago to find the oldest refrigerator still in use locally. The winner got a brand new unit to replace her 60 year old Philco. I wonder if her electric bill went up?

The real energy hogs, of course, are the old NO-FROST units. That's the part that gets ignored all the time.

The side-by-sides are the ones that use the most power. Every person that bought one said, "never again".:thumbsdn:

I think the WHOLE "Green" thing is about 90% crapola anyway. Now we got lite bubs that are gonna cost $10.95 a piece, showers that put out less pressure than an arthritic mouse on a flat rock, & commodes that you gotta flush at least 2X to get Yr Business Done-How is any of THAT "Saving" the planet ? Horse hockey...

the green thing, is green in the pockets of the state, local, & fed .just a new way to charge more for everything . we could be useing are own oil ,gas ,coal ,exct.

Nobody could deliver them either, they're heavy bastards.

The older fridges from the thirties and forties, with their little inside freezer compartments, really used very little juice and were very quiet. But you had to defrost them manually, which is a real pain to do. The newer ones are bigger and no frost: to get the latter feature they have to have internal fans to circulate air over the cooling coils, and then heaters to defrost those coils daily. All that takes juice. I like the old fridges but for the size, large freezer section, convenience of no frost, I gladly pay an extra KWH or two at 8 cents each, per day.

Buddy of mine & his college roomate had a unique way of defrosting THEIR fridge....Taking a soldering iron, making holes in the ice, then stuffing a Bottle Rocket in the holes, & setting it off...BLAMMO ! But it worked...Both these guys were pretty smart & had WAY too much time on their hands...Which is always DANGEROUS...(grin)

Every 2 months, the old Westinghouse gets like an igloo so bad the "icebox" door won't close, just put a big tray under the coil to catch the melt and let it air out for a day. Its sure a pain if its your kitchen fridge.

Mine only uses 90-95 Watts. A 40" Sony 40V4100.

As far as refrigerators, my old Sears Coldspot I think it was, a late '70s model 17-18 cu ft avocado green color, separate freezer on top, pulled just over 4 Amps when it ran. The '97 Whirlpool 22 cu ft freezer on the bottom black monolith pulls less than an Amp, about 100 Watts actually, when it runs. So there was a significant difference between those two.

There's nothing more disappointing or even depressing than encountering a non-incandescent light.

Our local (Aussie/Canadian-investor-owned) power company is at or approaching maximum capacity using nasty coal-fired plants and other sources to sell electric power to its customer base. They push Chinese Compact Flourescent lamps literally into your hands, hoping you'll use them, keeping the gotta-upgrade boogeyman at bay a few more years.

If everyone used hard-switched outlet strips on as many modern electronic devices as possible, you'd save enough energy to power a warm, freindly, soothing incandescent bulb by your favorite chair or bedside table :yes:

:lmao: that is probably the funniest thing I've read in the last week!:lmao:

Were they also the 'remove stump with as much dynamite as you can pack in to it' types?

Yep...Winston, my buddy's roomate, inherited this farm that was FULL of stumps.. He & John got a case or so of Dyna-Might, & Set To...This was before I knew Winston, or I'd likely wheedled in on the deal...They blew up stumps for 2 or 3 days-And had a helluva good time doing it....Another buddy got some dynamite, just cause he wanted to, & we had a Dynamite Party one night...You can toss a 1/4, 1/2 stick on the ground, set it off, all it does is make a loud BANG ! & maybe blow out a couple handfulls of dirt. Big whoop. But now, if you put something on TOP of it, say a hay bale, or an old tire, IT will get blown sky-high, & is most impressive.

Those units made in the 60s-early70s were the biggest energy hogs and, just like the cars, got WORSE in the later 70s.

My parents had a side by side 24 cu ft GE that was "Harvest Gold" when they built the house in '69 it lasted until 1995 with NO maintenance. It pulled 7 amps IIRC I hate to think how much energy that beast consumed during its existence:sigh:

I strongly object to the notion that the oldest stuff is the most inefficient.:nono:

Just finished a Vizio 32 inch plasma. 277 watts draw on the watt meter. They have enough nerve to give it an energy star rating! I use a small dorm refrigerator in Mississippi that draws around 500 watts running. It runs on a 1200 watt generator if the power goes out. I defrost it once every two months.
And yes, I use a timer on a strip to turn off the electronics when I go to bed. Makes the capacitors in the power supplies last a lot longer!
I use a small incandescent for a downstairs light as I don't trust the CFL power supplies since one started flickering and when I broke it open the board was darkened from heat and the capacitors were bulged!

Therein is the #1 reason I do not have a plasma TV. TV is on here 15 hours a day or so, and a plasma would be expensive to feed.

I can make my 40" LCD use more power by turning up the backlight all the way to 5. Then it reaches 220W. Run backlight at 3 and power is about 90-100 Watts. Picture is plenty bright. In fact looks much better at a lower setting. However seems like most new LCD sets now use LEDs for the backlight, not sure about power usage with those.

Plasmas are terrible for power consumption... you don't even have to hook up a meter to one to tell that much, just stand about 3 feet away and you can feel the heat off 'em.

LCDs aren't that great either... and some of the fancy "eco" LED ones actually draw more power than comparable CCFL-backlit units. The 42" Hitachi LED unit we have here pulls about 130W on a pretty low brightness setting.

OTOH, I picked up a 2004-ish 52" CRT rear-projection HDTV off the side of the road a year or so ago, and fixed it up for a friend. Out of curiosity I hooked it up to the Kill-A-Watt and could hardly believe the reading I got... it was something like 65W. :yikes:

I agree completely. Perhaps I'd better be careful, lest I really get worked up into a lather about this sort of thing.

One of the electrical utilities around here is running a "turn in your energy hog" campaign. Their plan is collect old refrigerators that are still working and give the owner a little bit of cash for them (about $30 or so).

I'm not sure what they expect someone to do with the $30, as it won't put even a minor dent into the purchase of a new refrigerator to replace the old one. That's the first problem...even the most basic new refrigerators sold at various home improvement stores around here are eye-poppingly expensive. :yikes:

Second problem...reliability. I hear lots of people who traded in an old but perfectly functional refrigerator say that they wish they hadn't as the new replacement is not as reliable.

Third...is the efficiency really better? Though I don't have any truly hard evidence of this, I'd swear the older refrigerants remove heat better than the newer, greener ones. I know my 1974 GE refrigerator with R12 (IIRC) cools down a whole lot faster than a very similar 2001 model charged with R134A. Both share the same basic physical design, only the styling has evolved to stay with the times.

I also hear from lots of people who buy new dehumidifiers, only to have them last only about a year before the fan motor breaks or the cooling system leaks. These things aren't cheap either! My 40-year-old (sold new in late 1973) Sears Coldspot "Blotter" dehumidifier is still running perfectly, with one replacement fan motor and a new electrical plug in all of its years. Power draw numbers between it and a newer (1995) Magic Chef unit are within a few percent of each other.

Compressor motors, thermostats, and evap/condenser coils sure don't seem to have changed much. I supppose that maybe their internals have been redesigned a little over time, but that's probably about it. Materials used to insulate the refrigerator also seem to have changed little.

As long as the door seals on an older fridge are good and the cooling system is healthy, I just can't see there being a whole lot of difference.

My Insignia 19e720a12 19" LED-LCD flat panel draws 25 watts when operating, under one watt in standby, and is Energy Star certified, according to its specifications in the instruction manual.

The new flat screens with LED backlights should draw much less current than the earlier ones with CCFL backlighting. Of course, the larger screen sets will draw more current, even using LEDs as backlights. I have read here of some very large flat screens that draw upwards of 500 watts; someone mentioned in a post recently here at VK a flat screen that drew 580 watts (!) in normal operation. Much of that may well be due to the power source for the backlight (CCFL[s]) -- again, the larger the lamp (or the number of lamps), the more current will be required to operate them. My best guess is that 80 percent of the power draw of a modern large-screen flat panel TV is the power supply for the backlights, since there are no power-hogging tubes in the TV chassis or electron beams in the panel itself. Home theater setups with 1kW, 5.1(or more)-channel surround sound and a large TV, however, are a different story. These can and often do draw well upwards of 500 watts, and will drive the owner's energy bill sky high if he or she (or his or her family) watches a lot of TV and/or listens to the sound system for hours at a time. I can also envision a set like miniman82's DLP drawing 500+ watts, due to the arc lamp and its hefty power supply.

I did a power check of some various flat-screens:

Philips 50" LCD 2006- 448 watts steady
Panasonic 42" Plasma 2004 - 220 watts varies
Panasonic 37" LCD 2009- 64 watts steady
Samsung 50" LED 2010- in progress

Based on what LED does for exterior lighting energy use versus metal halide and high-pressure sodium, I expect it to be low.

Got my '57 G.E. defrosting as I type this. It's in the kitchen instead of being the storage frige now that it's outlasted 3 new ones.

Brings back memories... I remember growing up with a 1951 or so Frigidaire and my mother taking everything out of it every few weeks to defrost it. And the thick frost buildup. Break a chunk off and eat it like a snow cone... !

That seems high. Does it have a backlight level setting?

My 2008 Sony 40" LCD has 1-5 backlight setting in the menu. 1 is lowest about 80 Watts, 5 highest, about 220 Watts. I set it to 3 90-95 Watts as measured with a Kill A Watt meter.

I'm amazed the entire refrigerator didn't explode into the proverbial "million pieces" :yikes: when the bottle rocket(s) went off.

You are so right about your friend and his college roommate having too much time on their hands. Did they get away with their very risky stunt?

Using any kind of explosive device if you don't know (or are not sure of) what you are doing can be lethal, as well as risky and/or downright dangerous. Were they living in an off-campus apartment or in a dormitory? In either situation, I'd think they would have been sternly warned or even punished if word of their stunt ever got out. If they were in a dormitory, they would likely hear from the campus police; if they were in an off-campus apartment, they would get the boom lowered on them (and possibly evicted) by the landlord.

Was visiting my mother a few weeks ago and she was excited, they had just gotten rid of the 80s era refrigerator in the basement. The power company took it in on their new program where they pay $50 for any old working unit. 2 men came by and loaded it in a truck.

I have a 10 YO. ,1.2 cu ft Sanyo dorm refridgerator, that only takes 71 watts running. I plugged into my Watt-Watcher. It does a great job keeping the adult beverages cold. It also has the condensor coils on the back, which is more efficient.

Here is a "classic" example of the use of explosives by people that thought they knew what they were doing, back in 1970:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79tl2H3QzT0

:)
jr

Ah yes...the PPL oldest fridge contest. They had an ad for this in the paper the other night, I think it was a half page. I just remember that it spelled energy as "enegry". The mistake wasn't buried in the ad copy, but rather boldly printed on one of the headlines in the ad.

:lmao: :lmao: :lmao:

fridge
 

no government program is going to come between me and my Crosley Shelvador

Nice Crosley! Every time I see an old refrigerator on ebay, asking at least $500

fridge
 

Thanks Dave, got it last year off craigslist for $50 bucks. it was in the basement of Japanese immigrants who couldnt lift it so it stayed down there for the 38 years that they owned the house, got it home ,put a new cord on it, and, ice cold. Amazing whats still out there...

I have a freind who has had one for ages. You need to get a matching Crosley white-pained radio to go on top like he has!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Old-Crosley-...item3a79200268

As a former owner of a side-by-side, I can personally attest to the energy-sucking habits of those Mullion heaters. How do we know when a Mullion gets too cold, anyway? Do they complain or something?

My '53 Norge is still keeping the milk cold :) . I rescued it through a metal scrapper friend of mine. I used to give him all my worn out snowblower carcasses, and he asked me if there's anything I'd like. I said, as a matter of fact, if you ever come across and old fridge.....and 3 days later he called me about this one. It's in perfect shape, and hadn't been in use since the early 1960s. The old couple had passed, and the kids just wanted it gone as they were preparing their house for sale....

Pictures after a very good cleanup, and having it plugged in in the garage to make sure everything was up to snuff. Had it running for 2 weeks, then sold my 6 year old Kenmore fridge and moved it in the house....

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f9...rld/norge1.jpg

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f9...rld/norge2.jpg

Here she is, two years later, still working flawlessly in my kitchen :)

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f9...d/100_4800.jpg

kitchens
 

i am seriously amused at whatever it is we do here, your kitchen shots are great, and im laughing because it is so similiar to mine and,i bet, alot of other peoples, that are here. Got to love the old Norge...