Why are fridges in cold climate countries not mounted into the wall of a house so the ambient air could cool the inside?
In: 1559
Sure winters here are cold. -40C
But the summers are super hot to +40C
So 🤷 I like a constant cool temperature in my fridge.
If a refugerator gets too cold there is no longer a temperature gradient…it thinks it’s cold enough and stops working…
Fun fact! I live in The San Francisco Bay Area. Our weather here is surprisingly predictable most of the year. It tends to drop into the 50s F overnight, and warm up to the mid-70s during the day.
Houses here constructed before refrigerators were common often included a “California Cooler,” which was a cabinet in the kitchen including two mesh-covered vents: One in the bottom of the cabinet, and one in the top, with slatted shelves for good airflow.
Overnight, the warm air would rise out the top, drawing in cooler air from the bottom. As the temperature rose outside during the day, the cabinet would stay (relatively) cool during the highest temperatures of the day.
I rented a house for a few years that included this, and it was a neat place to store things like bread and fruit to get a little more life out of them.
Fridges are for keeping food “cool”. It’s a tough line to maintain, year round, as getting warm will spoil some foods, and freezing can destroy others.
A better question would be about freezers. Not having a freezer in a cold enough year-round climate is way more doable.
I grew up in Russia, and my parents used some of the storage space right under a big kitchen window as the second fridge. They even had a special name for it, literally “under-window fridge”. So as a child, this was an entirely natural thing to me. Buying a fridge was rather difficult at the time, so I imagine we were not the only ones.
That’s an Alaska refrigerator. I have a friend who lived there, the fridge was an insulated cabinet against the kitchen’s exterior wall, with a hole drilled through the wall behind/inside the cabinet.
Ah the new England fridge.
In the winter my family will just put the gallon of milk ect. On the porch in the snow. Depending on item leaving out overnight isn’t recommended but works great for holiday parties.
If you’re talking about a fridge with coils this might not be done because if could lead the coils to freeze which stops the fridge from working, for a refrigerator to work the fluid in the coils has to flow, if it freezes and stops flowing then it stops cooling, It happened to the refrigerator we kept in our garage one cold winter.
True story: I used to live in a country where winter was 4C and below and my in-laws used their car as a 2nd fridge. Just leave it on the sit.
Also, putting beers outside to cool after shopping was also fun.
When I meal prep in the winter I leave food on the balcony to cool. If it’s chilly, like -3c I will dump it there overnight, if it’s -30c the food is “done” in one hour or so.
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