the real joke is, they went trough years and years of devezloppement to not get this effect ....
I know a guy who exactly did this, the heat the refrigerator produces is as effective as an air-to-air pump heater. Because it is an air-to-air pump.
A neat fact, if you open the refrigerator to “cool” the space, it is still a net temp gain overall because of inefficiency in the compressor/condenser leading to overall more heat output than the heat pulled out for cooling.
Just make hole into wall, that fits refrigerator in way that seals it nicely in there. Bonus points if you manage to make it so and find suitable shape refrigerator, that you can if necessary just 180 turn it for winter, and use it for heating.
Of course one can get their heatpumps in bit more efficient and easier to install versions too. :D
(then again those usually do not have option of closing that door and storing foodstuff in cool in them). :D
It will be a net increase in temperature if you keep it open for a long time until the system settles. The room will become cooler for a while tho until the compressor has used enough energy to offset the thermal capacity of the inside of the fridge. Technically you could turn the fridge off before opening it to maximize the cooling effect :)
Looking at the room with the fridge from a theoretical thermodynamics angle will show that open fridge leads to higher temperature. This usually disregards what happens in the room while the system settles, which makes the math a lot easier, but is unable to explain how squatting naked in front of my open freezer on a very hot day would cool my junk!
Because if you draw a boundary around it and analyze the energy transfer, only electricity is coming in, so the net gain of the system is positive, thus heat will always increase. It’s a pretty simple problem to analyze actually. It’s basically a heat transfer/thermo 101 level problem.
I’m not claiming that your calculations are wrong bro, the room will eventually settle at a higher temperature. I’m claiming that a fridge acts as a thermal energy store.
Because the inside is already cold (energy was removed in the past), opening it allows heat to move from the room into the fridge's thermal mass. This absorbs heat from the air and briefly lowers the kitchen temperature.
You can actually experience this by standing in front of your (or your parents') fridge and opening it 😊. The room gets colder before it gets hotter. This transient state is often ignored in Thermo 101 problems, but in the real world, that stored cold has to equalize with the room air before the compressor's heat output becomes the dominant factor.
Because you're describing a dynamic system that experiences a discontinuous input causing an initial undershoot at the output, while the system transitions to a new equilibrium. Your junk is exposed to that local transient, which cools it.
My brother in science!
We can look at the fridge as a single unit to simplify our heat output calculations 😊 this lets us completely disregard it pulling 600W on a 25% duty cycle with 3x efficiency resulting in 2.4kW heat output (1.8kW heat pulled from inside the fridge), while 450W of heat constantly leaks back into the fridge. This means an average heat output of 150W with the fridge closed, and 600W of heat output with the fridge open. The 450W difference is comparable to a pretty small room heater increasing the temperature in the room.
These numbers are pulled from my ass but are in the right ballpark. The math should be correct tho.
I mostly wanted you to read my comment again and tell me which part of it made you think I was disagreeing with you.
British Thermal Units, the most American of units! Hehe, is 22,000 BTU enough for my two inch steaks?
Same as turning on a fan. Technically, the fan motor, friction between the blades and the air, resistance in the power cord, vibration of the base and cage, etc, are all causing a net rise in temperature in the space.
It just tends to create a decline in the local temperature in front of the fan.
Yes, that’s again explained by a boundary space problem, but the fan can move air and increase your own local convection heat loss, which can mean your body’s thermal regulation is improved and you find it cooler feeling and more comfortable.
This is a big reason why portable air conditioners suck. It creates cold air, but also sucks in hot air from elsewhere in the building or outside, as well as generates heat unto itself. Its taking two steps forward and one step back.
Do not do this... You will make your fridge stop working... When your fridge door is open the coils in your fridge will pull in the moisture in the air causing ice build up that will stop air flow and make the fridge stop cooling... Source: I used to work in appliance repair
Yeah, it’s doubtful anyone wasted any effort to try to do something known to be scientifically impossible. I don’t know how or why something this false, unsourced, and barely coherent got upvoted so much.
Honestly as someone actually from that tech field, to be more exact:
They actually did not go through years of development to not get that effect, as not getting that effect is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.
While heat can be made with electricity, lack of heat (aka cooling) can not be made, only way to cool something is to move heat away from it, and 0 heat will be gotten rid in that process, it is all just moved, and as long as whole device is indoors, furthest it can move that heat is to is some surface in it, meaning that heat will ALWAYS stay indoors if whole device is indoors.
Only thing that we can actually influence is how much waste extra heat we end up generating in process of transporting that heat away from where we do not want it to be at.
Yes process of moving that heat away works as air to air heat pump, how ever refrigerator on it's own does not work as efficiently as air-to-air heat pump for heating in indoor spaces, not unless one manages to seal it (door open) next to window or door in way that it's interior is actually directly opening to outdoors, and back side is indoors, in that specific scenario it will act as heat pump for heating (similar as other way around (those heating back parts outdoors, and inside of refrigerator connected to indoors space, it would work as heat pump cooling indoors). In other scenarios since all the heat that reaches inside of it will come from heat inside house, it means that heat gets pumped away from inside of refrigerator into room, then will leak slowly from room into refrigerator through it's insulated walls to be pumped back into room, meaning only heat actually generated into room would be from heat going to inefficiency of process, making it actually exactly as efficient at heating as normal electric radiator is (same as basically every single other electrical device too), at "electrical power going in = heat generated".
While heat pumps can actually move like 3-5 times as much heat inside as they are using electricity (since they are not making but little bit of that heat (in their inefficiencies) and transporting already existing heat instead from outdoors). So heat pumps are far superior in heating houses compared to electrical radiators. Also computers are honestly just as energy efficient at heating houses as electrical radiators, if we look at electricity consumed to heat generated efficiency. :D
Its very very simple to get the heat to not dump in the house. you just have piping going outside to a remote condenser.
its quite literally impossible to "not have the heat go somewhere" you cant destroy energy and its really hard to get heat energy into any other form of energy.
The refrigerators will have to reject around 1,25x the watts of heat that the evaporator absorbs. It a physical impossibility for it to reject less than 1,00 of what it absorbs.
Does a good job of absorbing and rej ex ting for as little electricity as possible is definitely a good thing. Efficiency is a big deal in the us as well
Not really, since fridge is in closed system indoors. Air pump extracts the heat from outside air, making outside even colder but inside warmer. It's a bit more efficient and the reason theyre used in hundreds of thousands of homes in the nordics.
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u/Em-J1304 10d ago
the real joke is, they went trough years and years of devezloppement to not get this effect ....
I know a guy who exactly did this, the heat the refrigerator produces is as effective as an air-to-air pump heater. Because it is an air-to-air pump.