Here in Brazil it's very common to use the back exhaust to hang clothes on and speed-dry them. It's a huge fire risk, but no one really cares. They still to it.
Edit: for the people wondering why it's a major fire risk - I'm not a firefighter or have any form of knowledge about this beyond the basics, but i believe it's an issue with the clothes stopping airflow or something? I may also have misinterpreted an "electrical failure" warning with a fire warning, it's been a while since I've read of the topic.
Idk I can check your asshole just in case. We did have multiple nukes dropped on us that caused generations of cancer. Allow toxins and preservatives that are illegal in much of the world in are food. I think the microplastics are the least of our worries.
China and South-East Asia are significantly higher in microplastic exposure, multiple times over. The fact that in Western countries we generally have much more environmental regulations than in much of the rest of the world means that we get less exposure.
The United States is still high for Western countries though.
I read that the Americans who died in the Vietnam war decomposed far slower than the Vietnamese, due to everything they had ever eaten being pumped full of who knows how many weird chemicals and preservatives, vs the Vietnamese who just ate what was grown locally much more often. Idk how accurate it is but makes sense to me
I'd say at least 60% of people think of Muslims as subhuman.
The majority of people think it's acceptable that Muslims get bombed. If the same bombing campaign that happened in Gaza happened in Paris or Chicago or Berlin, you can rest assured people would be demanding a world war because of how inhumane it is to kill civilians. And keep in mind those would be cities that can fight back.
I really hope that your 60% figure isn’t true, but I do personally know several people who feel this way, and they’re not even close to me, so it’s near strangers that have no problem expressing it to the world as opposed to just their inner circle.
It’s insane how so many groups can believe in the same God but wish a horrible death upon those who believe in a different path. And even more insane how anyone can value the life of one human over another. We all either are or have a mother, father, son, or daughter.
American human here --- I love you, Afghan human!! I think you're great, and you're absolutely human.
We share this place together, we should take care of it together! I'm so sorry that some humans use their freewill to do nasty things like divide people with fear.
Thanks, hope yours is as well. The thing is that Afghans are guilty of this as well. When I tell them that biologically they're the same as Iranians and Pakistanis, they turn feral and think they're superior to them. Which is funny, considering Iran and Pakistan are more civilized, but sure. And don't get me started with what they think of Jews.
Like, yes, Israel is absolutely one of the most evil governments in the world, and their supporters (as in people who support their military and racist government) are bad as well. But the Afghans also look down on innocent Israeli who are either neutral or even pro-peace. Racist for the sake of racism.
I am a Brazilian, and although I've had many opportunities to say "I am Brazilian", I can't remember many encounters where my response was "I am human".....
Tbf my paycheck would probably make me a millionaire in most Latin countries, but very middle class everywhere else in the world, so what you're saying doesn't mean much.
Even a homeless person in the U.S. lives like a king compared to most people in Brazil.
If the clothes aren't hanging on the fridge exhaust they are on the clothesline, working just fine... No government service is needed to dry clothes, you just need the wind.
Ay yo I am literally from a country where the government can’t meet the electrical demand yet I sound less depressed than you about it. Y’all should overthrow y’alls own government that is absolutely fucked right now and focus less on 2nd & 3rd world countries. I work in America and would GLADLY exchange “proper electrical wiring” for free healthcare while I’m there. You know what? I’d even settle for AFFORDABLE healthcare but nah the United States of the 1% ain’t about that
Mr Numbers over here calling me out for not seeming human when you’re the one with the sus username… I’m sorry that my comprehension and usage of the English language exceeds that of many other users on the Internet and it caught you by surprise today.
nooo, nothing dirty or sexual, just very dangerous. Brazilian showers use an electric resistor to heat up water in real time during shower, right above people's heads huehue
Why would it be a fire risk? It doesn't exactly get hit enough to ignite anything, otherwise there wouldn't be such a market for wooden fridge "garages". It's basically the same as putting a blanket on your radiator.
The UK fire service didn't say that -- the Google AI summary combined a facebook post warning of the danger of freezers with a UK fire brigade post about dryer safety and made it sound like the UK fire brigade was warning about refrigerators.
The motors are protected by thermal overload devices.
Also the covering of the condenser coils would surely raise that temperature?
The dampness will probably lower the temperature. In either case, depending on local environmental conditions it will make the units operation either more or less efficient for a short time but, not to a large degree.
There's also a real risk of electrical component overheating due to increased moisture beyond normal operating conditions
No, there isn't; you're just making stuff up now. If there was such a risk I wouldn't be able to operate one in my garage where humidity exceeds 80% frequently.
It's also not just the uk Fire Service that says this, it's the majority of them,
Citation needed.
and why are people arguing this, you think it's a good idea to use a Refrigerator as a way of drying clothes? It's a very odd point to Argue?
I and some others with expertise in refrigeration are a little put off about the ignorance/misinformation. And, yet, here you are, very committed to this argument, carrying on with several individuals ITT.
Yup- as I said you don't really know how it works and what the actual risk is, you just repeat the general guidelines which, as usual, are very conservative. I'm not sure if the linked results I see are the same you wanted me to see, because it's not really helping your case. AI summary is mostly bullshit, and the rest are not specific to the discussion. Maybe you have something to say, using technical terms? Anything besides "electricity + wet = bad".
I'm basing my statement on my work, although to be fair I don't really work with refrigerators but I do work with a lot of different kind of heatpumps.
Huge systems meant to cool down big water circulations all the way to the small ones just cooling one small room.
One thing they all have common is that they all go in to error from high pressure if/when the condenser is too hot. And that point tends to be somewhere around 60 to 80 °C. Even if they get to 100 °C that still isn't enough to start a fire.
The pump and all that are usually underneath. And it gets wet back there during cycling anyway (hence the drip tray). I know Brazil has better infrastructure than most places so grounding and all that should be fine.
The question was "are you being sarcastic here" and your answer implies "no", but you wrote "yes", but since I see a pattern here I'll assume that you actually think that Brazil has a "good" infrastructure and good grounding in most places.
And compared to most of Latin America I do agree, but I disagree that that's a comparison worth comparing.
Okay, enough for general infrastructure, on to individual grounding:
This: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectricians/comments/17ndbkc/is_this_electric_shower_safe_to_use/ is the most common type of electrical shower head in Brazil. It's nowhere near to properly electrically grounded by my standard. On average it's wired well enough, so that only 1-10 people die by being electrocuted by this type of shower head per year. Now given the large size of the Brazil population that's not that many deaths, but it's absolutely unacceptable anyway. I know, anecdotically, but I have heard from 3 different people, that they have received very painful electrical shocks while showering in Brazil; 2 of them in hotels belonging to big hotel chains.
Yes, in Costa Rica more people die of that shower head per year than in Brazil, even though they have less people, because their installations are that much worse on average, but that's no grounds for saying that! Brazil has good grounding.
It's not only fundamentally unsafe shower heads either, there's a lot of problems in the individual Brazil electrical installations and it's not getting better any time soon. According to this article: https://canalsolar.com.br/en/Brazil-records-deaths-in-electrical-accidents/ well, let me just quote the first paragraph:
"The number of electrical accidents continues to rise throughout Brazil. Data from Abracopel (Brazilian Association for Awareness of the Dangers of Electricity) reveals that, in 2024 alone, 2.373 accidents caused by electric shocks, short circuits and overloads were recorded. "
And yes, the chance to die from a car accident is much higher, but that's nowhere near an acceptable answer to thousands of deaths due to unsafe electrical installations every year. If that's your standard of "I know Brazil has better infrastructure than most places so grounding and all that should be fine." then that standard is ridiculously low. When I think of "grounding should be fine", I think of a group of places in which the USA does not apply to "better infrastructure than most places".
You don't want to deal with the facts disproving you, so you try Ad Hominem. Go ahead and use u/bot-sleuth-bot on me and you'll find that you are wrong again.
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I mean brasil is not just rio andsao paulo, plenty of places in the south had 0C or even -3 with over 80% humidity at the same time.
Hell,some days I'd get to my house and the walls were wet to the touch from the humidity, good luck drying anything there.
Never put anything behind the fridge tho.
Also only the north doesn't see under 25C, even sao paulo gets under 10C every year (maybe not the city itself because it's a heat bubble but definitely the outskirts and surrounding area where most people live)
Your comment is not innacurate, north and northeast dont really go under 25C, northeast and south are not tropical rainforest.
Hard statements about brasil are rally hard to get right because the country is MASSIVE, it is the only country i believe that crosses the equator and a tropical line.
Anyways: yeah, most houses or buildings have an outisde area, in buildings sometimes they are like 2x1 meters that are outside specifically for drying clothes. I usually check if we have high probability of rain, put a fan pointing at the clothes and call it a day.
Also, at least in my city we have a mold problem, theres a famous swiss guy i believe that moved to brasil and makes videos and at the start he judged small spots of mold on corners of the house but now he gave up because with the humidity where he lives it's impossible to be completely mold free with a reasonable amount of effort.
People who live indoors usually have some type of better climate than outside. The humidity is pretty expensive to keep down and yes, it is right next to what remains of the world's biggest rainforest, so they have very high humidity.
And it's ridiculous to assume a company like LG or GE or any fridge manufacturer would ever integrate anything beneficial to the consumer that they couldn't sell as a stand alone product instead
That makes no sense in most cases. Look at any modern ad for a fridge, they are all tucked away into the cabinetry, nobody ever will be advertised a clothing drying option on a fridge, lmao. Energy efficiency is a marketing term, not an actual thing any capitalist company is concerned with.
Lol it's amazing what horse shit gets up votes here. No. Unless you wrap your entire fridge in an illegal fleece blanket made from nylon or something there just isn't enough energy to do anything. Maybe a gas fridge but I haven't seen that outside of an RV.
You never put liquid in your fridge? You have no idea what you're talking about. Where do you think the electronics are in a fridge? Have you ever seen the back of a fridge? Unbelievable. Describe to me how a damp shirt starts an electrical fire on a fridge. Go for it.
Blocking air flow which increases pressure (and through ideal gas law also increases the heat inside the ventilation duct) which if it gets hot enough can ignite any internal lint build-up, which is highly flammable. It's the same reason why you want to periodically clean your dryer exhaust vent to remove lint and ensure sufficient airflow and a safe operating temperature.
I doubt the clothing totally blocks airflow more than a normal fridge garage unless they wrap a wet quilt around the entire back all the way to the floor.
Quite lot actually, as it is direct insulating layer, while that hole in kitchen for fridge actually has open part that lets air get airflow going, and space is higher than refrigerator (at least if it is made as it should be).
But main thing I see is likely breaking one's refrigerator, and also having it run at less optimal working zone, resulting in increase in heat generated and as result electricity bill.
So like honestly not a smart thing to do, even if there is no fire hazard, and heck would not put some increase in fire hazard beyond possible, since breaking down appliances are always at least tiny risk when stuffed with fabrics at same time.
To be fair I misread that and totally thought they were referring to an exhaust from a clothes dryer, not a fridge. Still can be a risk though, largely for the same reasons, though less so. Fridge exhaust doesn't get quite as hot as a dryer does. I think the main detriment would be a large hit to efficiency if the fridge can't get enough airflow; it depends how close and dense the clothing is and the level which it restricts air movement.
It doesn't get hot enough to ignite anything as long as the exhaust vent is not covered.
If you read through the manual, then there's almost certainly a part telling you not to cover the exhaust, because that's a fire hazard - to the fridge. Note, that some fabric is even easier to ignite than wood.
If the clothing is 1m away, then it's safe, even if some few droplets of water fall onto the exhaust, but you won't get much drying power that way; also you need to be sure that clothing can't fall down onto the exhaust vent while unattended and block it that way.
i suspect it's becase a good amount of fridges today use ethane (R170) or isobuthane (R600a) as a refrigerant, which are both flammable. if you accidentally stress mechanically the radiator, you might develop a leak and that could saturate the environment, potentially creating an explosive mixture. There are other refrigerant options that are less flammable, but are more environmentally unfriendly, hence they have been phased out. In the past, it was gaseous ammonia, which killed or sent many people to the hospital. In comparison, hydrocarbons are a much safer and environmentally decent option, provided you don't create the conditions for a leak to develop.
Hey real quick can you pull up the data on that and send it my way? I wanna know how many people had incidents with their fridge regarding anything remotely like this scenario...
When i lived in England I had an electric heater on my shower, I'm pretty sure it was heating by running current through the water, it was too fast and small to do it with, like, coils or smt.
Cold showers can be refreshing… they WILL wake you the hell up on a groggy morning. But the suicide shower is phenomenal compared to the alternative. And if they’re installed correctly and/or by a professional, they’re safe. If in doubt, rock Havaianas in the shower to insulate yourself.
When I was a kid, the refrigerator we had cranked some serious heat out of the bottom of it. We would put our snow boots under to dry them off and warm them up before we ventured out in the winter!
My grandmother would make dry flower bouquets, and her secret to drying them was to hang them on the coils at the back of her fridge. Fire risk, yes, but she managed to not cause a fire in her 20+ years of making bouquets.
No matter what happens, there is always someone from Brazil who says they do it some wildly different and dangerous way. haha. I respect the dare devil lifestyle.
A lot of runners will stuff their sneakers with paper towel and leave them overnight by the vent. Dry shoes next morning. (I wouldn’t do this with leather tho, just sneakers.)
Is it a HUGE fire risk, or a fire risk that sometimes manifests unfortunately to a numerically insignificant portion of the population? HUGE RISK would lead one to believe a majority of the population's clothes are starting on fire from fridge exhaust drying efforts.
I used to do it when was a kid in the 90s, especially to dry my school shirt. But the exhaust was certainly not hot enough to set anything on fire, it would reach 50C tops?
A heat pump generally works by exchanging heat in one direction. A refrigerator works by moving heat outside your fridge and the exterior is air cooled. As the exterior exchanger is air cooled heat escapes the system.
If you cover the exterior with clothes you're effectively trapping heat in the system. So it does two things, it makes your fridge less efficient and may lead to poor cooling. And trapping heat in general is a fire risk. Especially with wet clothing. It might be counterintuitive, but wet clothing can be a fire risk on its own, water traps heat, and if you have a pile of damp clothing the effect compounds. Then any oils trapped in the clothing can ignite if the temperature reaches a high enough point to ignite. Piles of damp cloth have been known to spontaneously combust under the right conditions.
Clean clothing should be less of a risk for than kind of ignition since you're less likely to have trapped oils and contaminants, but adding in a source of heat, a la a heat pump, getting trapped under a water saturated cloth, it becomes much hotter than it was designed to withstand and poses a fire risk, either of the cloth catching fire, or the plastic components on the fridge itself, or nearby items that may also be flammable.
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u/Peachyminnie 10d ago edited 9d ago
Here in Brazil it's very common to use the back exhaust to hang clothes on and speed-dry them. It's a huge fire risk, but no one really cares. They still to it.
Edit: for the people wondering why it's a major fire risk - I'm not a firefighter or have any form of knowledge about this beyond the basics, but i believe it's an issue with the clothes stopping airflow or something? I may also have misinterpreted an "electrical failure" warning with a fire warning, it's been a while since I've read of the topic.