Electricity: Practice 3

Refrigerator

This one appliance is uses a pretty hefty percentage of your normal energy bill. It makes sense—you can’t really turn it off each day.

Here is one practice that will keep it from working as hard, and help you use your resources more wisely: Sometime this week, stock your refrigerator and freezer as full as you can. If you have an empty fridge (like my college apartment fridge), it will be cold just like a stocked one. The difference is that one has cold things, while the other has cold air.

When you open the door of an empty fridge, cold air goes out to your kitchen, and the fridge has to go to work to replace it. In a stocked fridge, the cold stuff stays there and stays cold. End result: a stocked fridge doesn’t have to work as hard. If you are not the type who always has a fridge full of food, it doesn’t mean you need to buy a lot of food you can’t possibly eat or leave that mayonnaise jar in there when you know it’s expired. Just take some empty containers like milk jugs, fill them with water, and put them in those empty spots. You save resources and money, just by leaving them there.