Why are fridges in cold climate countries not mounted into the wall of a house so the ambient air could cool the inside?
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There’s a thing called a cold room which is not really insulated on the outside walls, but is insulated from the rest of the house, which gives extra cold storage in winter.
Because there aren’t a lot of inhabited places that stay around ~5-7°C all day, every day, all year, so there’s not exactly a big market for “wall mounted” fridges. If it gets much colder than that, your fridge has suddenly turned into a freezer, which isn’t ideal, and if it gets much warmer then obviously your fridge just isn’t anymore. It’ll also adversly affect the insulation of the house.
I have lived in houses without fridges or where the fridge was too small where we did this. The pantry is usually in the corner of the house so it gets cooler or even an outside pantry. The problem is that there is very little temperature control. In the summer temperatures can get quite high even in cold climates so the pantry would become room temperature or even higher. And in the winter you might risk frost in this pantry which destroys a lot of food. So it requires constant attention to the temperature and it might not be fully usable for large parts of the year.
Having a fridge inside is not a waste of energy in cold climates. The fridge will dump its excess heat into the room which means you do not need to heat your house as much using other means. Even the overhead from the compressor and such that gets got from use will end up as heat inside the house, which is where you want it. In fact split fridges is something you see in warmer climates, commonly industrial fridges, where you do not want to heat the inside of the house. So you can actually save energy in a warm climate by having the radiator on the back of the fridge stick outside the house. But in cold climates this would just waste energy.
In Canada we have what are called “cool rooms” we keep beer, pickled jars and potatoes in there. It’s just a storage room in the basement that is not heated and insulated on a perimeter wall.
My friend used to put her food on the balcony until it got too hot. No, but interesting question. I guess because temperatures vary too much and it would be difficult to move the fridge if you want it to be in a different place?
Fun additional fact: if the air around a fridge gets too cold it can’t cool anymore. My dad has his fridge in a storage room that can get really cold and it will stop working. It apparently needs a difference in temperature to work??
No matter how cold it is outside it’s never consistent enough to serve as a fridge. The closest to what you’re describing is a cellar. Also the way fridges work makes this less than ideal. They can take heat out of the inside to make it cool enough but they can’t do the opposite, which means that if you placed a fridge in an environment colder than the set temperature inside the fridge then the fridge would eventually get as cold as the outside temperature which is not desirable. Also fridges would have to come in two units like air conditioners with a unit outside and a unit inside, something that’s not feasible for apartments.
I have in fact done what you describe in Norway. I went there for a couple of months to work and me and the rest of the workers were hosted in rooms that didn’t have fridges. It was at the height of the pandemic so food was brought to us outside our doors instead of dining in the cafeteria and a lot of us would eat some of it and keep the snacks or fruit for later so we’d hang the bag outside the window. The result was that most foods got ruined because it was too cold outside, around -15 C.
A household fridge is a small energy consumer and it’s only cold outside for part of the year with no control over what temperatures you get exactly. So a fridge sized hole in a wall is just a very bad idea. Also, the refrigerant has a working temp range, if it’s too cold outside, it doesn’t vaporise and can’t pump heat.
To do something like it, I would rather have extra coolant loop in fridge, run it to radiator outside and when it’s cold enough outside you run that coolant loop rather than the normal fridge heat pump. It would make for a quieter fridge for part of the year and it would save energy, but not much and it would require a very custom fridge that just doesn’t exist on consumer market.
I wonder if industrial market has anything of the sort….. most likely yes.
Basements work for cold storage because the ground around it helps moderate the temperature. Topside, there’s way to much variation week to week, or even day to day (it was -25 on Tuesday and -7 on Wednesday here this week) for it to maintain consistency. And I’d have yet another hole in my wall – the windows and doors are draughty enough, thanks!
A fridge or freezer also works best with a constant temp, variable and unpredictable temp swings will not only make the unit work harder, but will impact food quality. Better bet might be an outdoor cold box. Maybe water filled walls that are allowed to freeze, stocked full and sealed. You would still need to monitor the ambient temp and move the goods to a proper unit if it starts warming, but you can probably manage a couple days once the temps start climbing
What you are proposing is basically air conditioning, but for a small room (fridge).
I guess for a normal fridge splitting the heat pump into a dedicated hot side (outside the house) and cold side (inside the fridge) is just not worth the hassle, space and complexity.
For big fridges aka cold rooms they certainly use a split arrangement.
It would make sense in all kinds of climates, as long as the outside of the house is cooler than the inside.
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