Funny thing, when I moved in, my last apartment had a refrigerator that was made in Yugoslavia. It died.
Resurrect it
Fridges actually do rest. They cycle on and off as needed to maintain their desired temperature and on average only spend about 30% to 40% of their time “on”.
I only found this out the other night because my fridge went dead silent for a long time. I thought it was borked, so I was peering deep into the freezer when I saw The Gates of Hell through the grate.
(Okay, so full disclosure, I had smoked some pot, but it totally looked like when Dana opened the fridge to Zuul before she was The Gatekeeper.) 😱😱😱
Anyways, turns out it was in defrost mode (which happens twice a day), and that involves some elements going orange or something. I know that’s vague-- I looked it up, but as I mentioned, I was high, so I only kinda remember, lol.
Edit:
The refrigerator activates a heating element located near the evaporator coil. This element warms the coils, causing any ice buildup to melt.
That is assuming they are in good working order with no broken seals anywhere. They will run continuously if they never manage to get near the target temp. Though in that case, your food is probably also not getting refrigerated and you hopefully notice.
heh. my 15 year old frigid started making random groans the last couple weeks. far enough apart that i couldnt figure out where it came from. got lucky one day it moaned while i was close enough to yank open the freezer and see where the lever for the icemaker had accidentally got flipped to the on position. since i hadnt hooked up the water line to it, the groan was the pump sucking vacuum
Why not take the ice maker out so you have more freezer room, even filling that space with a bucket with ice will help the freezer stay colder easier if you don’t use the space. Could save energy long term and make it last longer
that’ll probably be my next move with it. got a portable icemaker last xmas so havent bothered with the internal one at all. the portable makes resturaunt style crushed ice anyway which lasts longer than cubes or nuggets imho.
Fridges 100% die, they’re made to now. If your fridge is really that old and you can manage it, NEVER get rid of it, tell your parents to leave it to you in their will lmao.
You will lose money this way, old refrigerators were way way more power hungry and you can easily expect to spend more than a new fridge within 5 years.
You still can buy modern compressor
You can still get new fridges that will last for decades. It just won’t be one with LCD screens, ice machines, in door dispensers, complex internal designs, etc. Every one of those things simply creates a cascade of new points of failure, and component materials of varying ability to deal with the stress of being a fridge. You can buy new, efficient, fridges that are nothing but a box that cools, and a box that freezes, with doors. They will last for decades if you don’t do anything crazy, or your house isn’t destroyed by a natural disaster.
Gimme a brand and a model name, internet dude
I have heard good things about the SMEG fridges, FWIW.
We have a chest freeze from 1943 still running in my parents basement…
Gotta catch em all!
But how did THEY get chest freezer in 1943?
Jokingly.
My wife and I are on our third fridge in 35 years. But the furnace in her mom’s house when we sold it 5 years ago had been running since the late 1970s.
Except furnaces functionally shut off when not actively making heat. A fridge potentially is only off for power outages or a cleaning
Don’t fridges do the same thing? Once it gets the interior to the set temperature, the compressor turns off until the sensors say it needs more cold.
You are right, I totally forgot about that haha
30 years is a long life for a furnace. This thing was 45-50 and still running fine. The last maintenance note on the sheet on the inside was in the 80s lol.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh…
Glances over at my 1954 GE Combination that has NEVER been serviced outside of cleaning and replacing the light bulbs.
Old fridges never die. Modern fridges are more efficient but more break-y, can’t have both.
Actually modern fridges are usually less efficient. But that’s because they use refrigerants that are literally thousands of times less harmful to the environment.
Old appliances frequently used R-12 which is an damn nice refrigerant except it depleted ozone and has a GWP (global warming potential) of 10,900. That means 1lb of R12 released into the air causes the same amount of global warming as releasing 10,900 lbs of CO2.
Newer appliances use refrigerants like R134a which still works pretty well, doesn’t deplete ozone, and only has a GWP of 1,430.
The newest appliances are more frequently using R-600a which is hard on compressors because it has a high head pressure and it doesn’t cool quite as well. But it also doesn’t deplete ozone and it has a GWP of just 3. The bigest downside of that one is that it’s very flamable (it’s isobutane) so the legal limit on how much residential appliances can us is very low.
Survivorship bias
I’ve read somewhere it is because compressor nozzle has to be made thinner/fragiler for the better efficiency. Other comments say it’s because old refrigerants were better but more “dangerous”. Maybe both.
Old appliances broke, but they were made to be easy to fix so our grandparents could just swap out the broken parts. I helped my dad replace the compressor on an older fridge as a kid and the heating elements on my grandma’s toaster. I remember my dad taking me to some locally owned mom and pop hardware store where we could buy replacement parts for old appliances off the shelf. My parents still have the toaster, but that store closed down and new stuff isn’t made to be fixable anymore (most likely due to planned obsolescence thanks to late-stage-capitalism).
On a tangent, when you think about it, throwing an entire toaster away because one heating coil burned out or throwing awag an entire fridge just because the compressor gave out is not rational. But if you tell people we should have the freedom to buy repairable appliances then they look at you like you are crazy. To me, it is the other way around. Sustainability isn’t political or a luxury, it is an inevitabe, unstoppable force of equilibrium.
When it comes to refrigeration in particular newer appliances tend to break more frequently because they are using more environmentally friendly refrigerants. Old CFCs cooled really well with minimal work from the compressor. Newer fridges and freezers are more frequently using isobutane (R600a) because it doesn’t deplete ozone and it’s GWP (global warming potential) is 3 where the GWP of even non ozone depleting HFCs can frequently be in the thousands. The problem is isobutane requires higher head pressures to work properly and doesn’t cool as well as older refrigerants so the compressors have to work much harder to get the same result.
Also when it comes to household fridges and freezers, they really aren’t worth it to fix anymore. You need an EPA 608 cert to even touch refrigerants (in the US anyways). Plus you need a two stage vacuum pump and a recovery machine (amongst other things) both of which can easily cost as much as a new fridge. Then you need to actually have the skillset to remove the broken component and braze a new one in because everything uses brazed connections now to minimize leaks. Then you need to have the know how to properly recharge the system with refrigerant which when you’re working with a critical charge of maybe 2oz of refrigerant is an absoulte pain. All in all, maybe if you are already an HVAC tech and had the tools and materials on hand you might barely break even fixing your own fridge or freezer.
When it comes to consumer refrigeration they can’t be user repairable due to having to work with refrigerants and economies of scale mean they just generally aren’t worth a trained techs time to fix.
! subscribe to fridge facts
but in all seriousness, very informative… thx
There’s a YouTuber (Technology Connections) who’s really into heat pumps, which is the tech responsible for refrigerators and air conditioners.
Old stuff that broke got thrown out and forgotten
Just be sure to clear the lint off your coils every five years or so. Otherwise you’re making the poor guy suck air through a shag carpet.
suck air through a shag carpet.
Welp, that’s a new euphemism.
Self-hosters:
My PC is never on when I’m not using it.
My server, however…
Your PC is an unused server.
Server, as in singular? 😅
Well I have a VPS to run lemmy just because I don’t want something that public near my home network but I haven’t found the limit to my little i7 HP mini PC… Yet
MORE CONTAINERS
No redundancy? No high availability? No clustering? What are you even doing man? One server? Those are rookie numbers. You gotta bump those numbers up.
/s, obviously. You do you, and whatever works for your needs/budget.
Yeah I’m trying not to fall further down the rabbit hole at the moment. Want to get a big raid cluster going so I don’t have to be so skimpy on my Jellyfin library but I have to stop myself everytime I start pricing parts out lmao
The call of the upgrades will claim me one day though
I’m addicted to raspberry pis and have six of them for various purposes. Hard to say no to 5 watts when you wanna spin up another thing.
Are you able to easily attach spinning rust hard drives to those? If so, how? I think those things use more than 5W on their own. Biggest question I have before planning a horizontal raspi setup. Currently I use old x64 PC boxes for self hosting.
I’ve used a 2.5" hdd on a rPi before using a usb-to-sata adapter (powered from rPi’s USB port). I’ve used a 3.5" hdd using an hdd enclosure that’s externally powered.
I attached little portable USB SSD drives to them when they need the storage; otherwise I have been using raspikeys. Though I am excited about the new m2 chips on offer nowadays from RPi.
Currently my pis are used as:
- Two separate pi holes
- Shakenet
- Birdnet
- Homebridge
- Torrent client
NAS running a bunch of docker containers; a ThinkServer running Proxmox, which is in turn running Debian, which in turn is running more docker containers; a VPN running Debian, running docker containers…
It’s docker containers all the way down.
Spoiler
Send help.
Does it count if the secondary “server” is a NAS?
You host a server from your own computer at home?
It deeply saddens me that this is now considered freak behavior. It’s what the internet was supposed to be!
No, from the fridge.
Its a Doom server
Facts.
Every time the power goes out…!
I never believed in power outages until I came face to face with one
Thermal cycling is one of the biggest stressors electrical components can be subjected to. Leaving your processor on and at a consistent load massively improves the lifetime of the chip. So take THAT, mom!
I had to scroll way too far to find this. Especially considering that I have a desktop with full disk encryption, I don’t worry about it. If anyone ever did break into my house and take my computer, they would have to unplug it first; at that point, the disk would encrypt, and they’d have some really nice hardware which sucks for me, but that’s all they’d get.
I feel that. All the information stored on my PC isnt worth a fraction of what my graphics graphics card cost…
Heat cycling is a huge stressor on any material. That’s part of why diesel freight trucks tend to last well past a million miles while it’s newsworthy if a passenger car makes it that long. How many times a week is your Toyota Corolla driving 10+ hours at a time? Most commonly, when you hear of a million mile vehicle, it was making long haul deliveries daily and was maintained at the correct intervals.
I think there are a lot of other factors in that case.
The biggest reason why it’s rare to see regular cars get to a million miles is because they don’t get driven as much. At the average of 14k miles per year it would take 71 years for someone to drive 1 million miles. Since it takes so long to get there, many non engine related issues start taking hold like rust and obsoletion.
I’m over here just over 30k miles after 6 years
What’s the heat stress difference between idle/off and heavy-usage/idle for a PC? If the latter is much bigger, then turning it off may have a negligible impact while still saving some energy. Avoiding heavy-usage may also be a better solution than avoiding turning it off.
It’s obviously more complicated than can be summarized in a lemmy comment, but that said you’re absolutely correct. That load management is the reason bitcoin mining farms undervolt their cards, so that they can maximize lifetime while minimizing energy usage.
I run prime95 24/7 on my AMD FX-9590 to keep it at a nice stable temp. Plus it means I also don’t need to heat my house in the winter. Gotta love a tdp of 220W.
The fridge is a big pump, it needs to circulate… It’s when it sits idle for too long that it risks death!
My refrigerator was never the same after everything that happened in Yugoslavia.
Say what you will about Serbian nationalist fridges but unlike Yugoslavia, they were built to last!
