If there are more items in the fridge does each one cause the fridge to have a higher uptime when maintaining colder temperatures?
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In: Engineering
I literally build refrigerators for a living and it’s not recommended to fill your fridge up entirely, it works more efficiently if you only fill it up 2/3 or 3/4 of the way full and don’t block the “control tower” aka the center portion where the air flows between the freezer and fridge parts. These recs are for fridges with the freezer on top.
The two questions in the post ask different questions.
The subject is “with more items to cool?” so it does it work harder if you put more warm stuff in it. The answer to that is YES if more times is more or the same item at the same temperature. If the suff it not the same then it depends on what it is. Water, for example, have 4.9x higher specific heat. So putting in 1 kg of water or 4.9 kg of glass at the same temperature requires the same amount of energy to cool down. So if more stuff require more energy depend on the stuff.
The second question is “maintaining colder temperatures?” That is the energy used when all in it is cooled. Then if the door is not opened the energy usage is independent of what it contain. The heat is lost through the walls and they conduct heat the same way regardless of what is in it.
If the door is opened then more stuff results in lower energy consumption. the free cold air can escape and be replaced with warm air relative quickly when you open the door. If you have air trapped in a containers or have replaced it with something liquid or sold that stay in it you reduce the amount of air that can be replaced with warm air.
So when you open the door the more stuff results in less energy needed to return to the set temperature. The temperature will also be more even with more stuff in it.
So the answers is yes depending on what more stuff is. It works the same if closed and less if opened with more stuff in it.
Others are discussing the way a fridge must cool down any things you put into it, but there’s also another scenario: long after all the things you’ve put into the fridge are cool, what does the fridge have to do?
If you open the fridge door to take out a can of beer for example, a lot of the cold air in the fridge escapes and is replaced by room temperature air. That air will have to be cooled down by the fridge. But the things that were in the fridge will barely notice a change in temperature (unless the air is really hot). Technically, if the things you store in the fridge are not crowded to the point of limiting normal air flow inside the compartment, the more things you have in there the less air will require cooling after the door is briefly opened.
Each item that is in the fridge holds “energy”. If you place something hot in the fridge, it takes a while to cool the space back to where it was. This is done by the fridge working harder and the energy expended from the other items. This is why you are not supposed to put hot food in the fridge. On the other hand, all of that stored “cold energy” helps the fridge maintain temperature because, once those items are at the desired temperature, the compressor is effectively cooling dead space. It takes more energy to cool an empty fridge than a full one.
Actually, if the fridge is full of objects, it is easier to keep it cool, because they can take in a lot of energy while barely raising the temperature.
But if you put a lot of warm stuff in the fridge, it does take longer to remove all the heat in them.
It takes more energy to cool more items, but once they reach the temperature of the fridge, it they take roughly the same energy as air to keep cool.
Basically yes.
The volume bid heat. Ie energy has to be removed.
So the larger volume or larger heat of things put in it cause it to work harder to remove that heat energy.
When you open the door more items means more surface area is exposed to warm air. More heat is absorbed by more items than fewer items. The fridge will then have to work that heat energy out again.
The difference is very little because air has low heat capacity and conductivity.
For maintaining temperature with door closed it doesn’t matter.
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