New fridges would save renters cold cash, the state energy
April 19, 2012 at 7:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
Minnesota could save huge amounts of energy, and renters across the state could save some money, if the state adopts incentives for landlords to replace old refrigerators.
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Energy efficiency is the cheapest power out there at a cost of 2-4 cents pkwh. When any measure reduces the total amount of energy an area uses, the need for new generation reduces. When you can put off new generation projects you will get cleaner, cheaper energy for all. It is a win-win, good job to all involved.
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Step one – stop treating citizens like puppets. Government bureaucrats do NOT know how to live your life better than you do.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Here’s a novel idea. If renters want more efficient refrigerators then buy it yourself and tell your landlord to swap them out.
There’s nothing quite like the feeling a landlord gets when supplying a new refrigerator to a tenant and I am being sincere here because you feel good that they are happy and its just seems to be the right thing to do. Only to return in a few months for something else and you find a big $#%@% dent in the door like someone swung a golf club into it.
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148,000 fridg replacements will save $8,000,000? If so listen up…4 years ago I bought 29 new fridges for my apartments at a minimum cost of $632.00 each. The savings calculated from the story would be $54.05 per year. Can you figure out how long it will take for a tenant to pay off a fridge if the payments are capped at 90% of $54.05? Try 13 years. How many tenants want a loan of any kind that will haunt them for thirteen years? BTW like any competent landlord in an average year I replace fridges as a matter of normal maintenance, in my case about 8 or 9 per year average, regardless of any proposed incentives.
Also: The fo*lish law pushed by the envirowackos mentioned in the article won’t work at all. How does a tenant compare their expected electric usage to the usage of any previous tenant who may or may not have used only one or several TVs, or may or may not have had lots of lights on or next to none on or may or may not have had a computer or video game machine running constantly, or may or may not have used an electric waffle pan or griddle or microwave or rotisserie or curling iron or hair straightener, or may or may not have vacuumed daily or used andy number of other electrical devices. To provide a tenant an estimate of what their electric bill is totally meaningless but then, envirowackos obviously don’t really understand the real world.
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One factor nobody ever seems to address is the longevity of a new refrigerator. When I was a kid we had a refrigerator that was 25 or 30 years old and was still running just fine. I’ve heard that new refrigerators last an average of only 8-10 years before either needing major repairs and/or need to be replaced. How much energy is consumed to manufacture a new refrigerator and ship to to the appliance store and then deliver it to a home for use for 8 to 10 years ? It’s got to consume a lot of energy to manufacture a few refrigerator that will only last 1/3 the time of the older models. Sure older machines consume more electrical energy…..but how does saving 10 or 15 dollars a month in electricity compare to the extra energy (of various types) to manufacture 3 times as many refrigerators since the new ones only last 1/3 as long ?
Saving electricity is great…..but there are other factors such as the energy (and pollutions created) used to produce the new appliance, energy for transportation, energy used to disposal of the old appliance etc….We do seem to love to send things to an early grave….or landfill in this case.
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The reason those old refrigerators lasted so long is they had the good stuff running in their veins and they were built to last. Thanks to enviromentalists and their crazy beliefs that somehow refrigerants were damaging the ozone layer, even though all cooling systems are totally self contained, you’re lucky to get 10 years on a frig.
Not to mention almost everything today is built to fail — keeps this wonder economy rolling.
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Great point Jessica. We get ripped off on so many items as consumers.
The cost of replacing all these refrigerators would only be passed on to the renters. It would save the state energy but to claim the renter will save money is false.
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i think the word you are looking for is planned obsolescence and is inevitable in capitalism. We live in a throw away society that doesnt care when cheap goods go to crap because its cheaper to buy another then to fix it yourself. Our economy is based on throw it in the gutter and go buy another mentality. We need to change our economy to a sustainable one that switches to focusing on local economies that is the only way to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels that are shipping goods to china and back before it gets in your backyard. It is also the only way to produce american jobs that will pay and that will last.
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My guess is that to meet these new energy star ratings, refrigerator (and other appliances too) manufacturers are literally using the absolutey mimimum size components such as compressors, fan motors etc…..and while this does make them consume less electricity, they don’t last very long since these components are taxed to their absolute capacity and nothing that I know of that’s is running at 100% of capacity (or very close) will last very long. All items seem to last longer if they have some reserve capacity.
Liken it to if you were to put an engine in a typical car that was half the size of the current engine. Yes the engine would probably be able to get the car up to 55 MPH and quite possibly get better gas mileage….but it would be straining all the time and would probably fail at a very early mileage total. If you have to replace the car or even just the engine every 20,000 miles….how much energy are you really saving overall considering the enviornmental and/or energy costs in producing a new engine/car that only lasts for a relatively small total mileage compared the the larger engine, which consumes more fuel, but will last for 200,000 miles.
Our current refrigerator is a Whirlpool which is about 8 years old. We have already had one fairly major repair done on it which fortunately my husband was able to do himself so the cost was minimal…but if we’d have had to have a service call done it would probably have been around $200.00. We early on discovered that the coils underneath the unit are in a “W” shape and extreamly hard to clean effectively without having to empty the entire refrigerator of its contents and tilt it back a bit so you can get at them from the underside. This obviously is a two person job and takes lots of time to do….hence most people probably don’t do it. If the coils were designed this way to provide more airflow over them (which it does), it was probably done to meet the energy star ratings. However, if they are mostly clogged with dust since it’s very hard and time consuming to clean them……it most likely is less effecient when they are dirty than it would be if they had used several layers of flat coils underneath like they used to do that were very easily cleaned from the bottom front of the unit.
I’ve attached a link that will bring you to a very interesting posting by a fellow who took this faulty/impossible to clean properly “W” coil design all the way to the top at Whirlpool…and ended up getting the run around. If you read if you’ll see what I mean about the run-around.
http://whirlpoolrefrigeratorssuck.blogspot.com/2006/04/whirlpool-side-by-side-refrigerators.html
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I had a chest freezer from Sears, don’t know who Sears buys from.
Anyway, the manual that came with it said it didn’t have to be installed in a heated area, so I put it in my unheated porch. Well, guess what… And of course the warranty had ‘just’ expired.
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