Lets make Friday 'Joke Day'!

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ElPaso Pilot said:
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...back in the day when programmers knew what the code was supposed to do before they started writing.

When historians 100 years from now write about the history of programming, they're going to talk about the beginning days of compiled language and going to the moon, inventing the jet engine, etc, and then the period where people started to not understand how computers worked anymore, with a brief experiment called "agile" before everyone just gave up and let AI write programs. Which led to the giant disaster that almost ended civilization, but now I'm giving away too much of the novel.
 
A modern fridge might use 400 kWh/yr. One from the 80's is in the 1800 kWh/yr. An even older one that used an absorption cycle instead of a compressor will probably use twice as much as the 80's one.
At 16c/kWh, that's $224/yr more for an 80s fridge, and potentially up to $500/yr more for the really old one.
Under the extreme case you could buy a new fridge (barely) for the one year savings in electricity. Realistically, it would take 3 years.
 
Multiplying wattages by time is not realistic. In 1963 we bought a large GE white refrigerator, and an 18 cubic foot GE white freezer. Later, we took a month long trip to California, and the total energy bill for that month was less than $10.

The refrigerator gave excellent service until 2018, and was replaced with a more efficient GE, white, to improve the sales value of the house, expected to take place in the next decade. 55 years of reliable service.

The house was sold last year, with the refrigerator, but the freezer went to our grand daughter's house. 61 years, and never serviced, just kept the coils clean, and waxed the outside every decade. The insulation on the freezer was so good that in a 3 day power failure, door un opened, there was still frost on the bottoms of the shelves. It ran for several hours before stopping, so about 3 hours at rated wattage was all it needed for 3 days.

We bought beef a quarter of a steer at a time, so a lot in that freezer, plus we had a garden plot.

A land developer gave me permission to pick all the apples I wanted from an orchard that he was going to bulldoze in a week, my wife and 2 boys, plus two friends children picked a huge amount of apples, I bought a 15 year old Montgomery Ward 20 cu ft chest type, and filled it with shallow wooden boxes of apples. A timer turned the power on 15 minutes per day, and kept the temperature at 34 degrees, we checked the thermometer every time we removed a box of apples. So the max it ran was 7 hours a MONTH, and often when I checked with the timer on, it was not running.

After that freezer was empty, I sold it for what I paid for it.

Energy consumption of refrigerators is more the amount of time the door is open than many other factors. Keep the doors closed most of the time, and an old unit will be low energy use. Don't fill the land fills with working appliances, buying new that polluted the environment with their creation.

PS, I know what an absorption refrigerator is, and have not seen one in half a century. They were great for homes without electricity, and a great aunt had one until 1960. Electricity came before that, but power failures were frequent, and kerosene cheap, so it continued to be used.
 
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geezer said:
I know what an absorption refrigerator is, and have not seen one in half a century. They were great for homes without electricity, and a great aunt had one until 1960.
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They're still made and commonly used in RVs and off grid cabins. We have one in our RV, it's a "3 way" meaning it runs on propane, 110VAC, or 12VDC.
 
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