Can vintage freezers rival new ones? ( energy efficiency )

[amyofescobar]

I'm just curious how vintage chest and upright freezers do against their modern counterparts when it comes to energy savings
I'm especially interested in comparing vintage chest manual defrost to modern ones. Are the compressors just the weak link here? Anyone ever tried installing a modern compressor in an old unit?

 

[twintubdexter]

<span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #008000;">I'm certainly no authority, but I have the feeling there are still a lot of Amana, Deepfreeze and Ben-Hur chest freezers and the like chugging along in garages and basements everywhere keeping more than just a few packages of Birdseye cold. </span>

 

[amyofescobar]

I'm just thinking, how much energy do old chests use compared to new? I love the idea of never having to repair my freezer, even if it costs a little more to run each month. But if the energy usage is too much to justify repair savings, then bye bye vintage...

 

[cfz2882]

old freezers still on the job

there is a ~1947 GE freezer in my parents basement still going-it has a big cast iron bolted hermetic compressor that runs at 1725 RPM vs more modern ones that run at twice that speed and still last for decades...I thing the insulation and gasket effectiveness make a bigger difference than than the "efficiency"of an undersized compressor that has to run more often The current draw of the ~1947 GE was 3.6A while a 1974 westy freezer of similar size pulled 3A

 

[norgeway]

You have to consider one thing!

If it runs 50 or 60 years with no repairs...Then in the long run you save money, because a new one you will replace once twice or even more times, that has to be added to the cost...I will take vintage, Donalds parents bought a huge Westinghouse chest freezer the summer of 64 before he was born, its never been touched and still stays at a steady 5 below....

 

[sudsmaster]

If it's a GE, you might be able to call GE and get energy consumption data even for a vintage unit.

Or, get a watt meter and check the old one for about a week or so.

My overall impression is that older manual defrost chest freezers are pretty efficient, even if they have old compressors, providing as said that their insulation and gaskets are in good shape.

The biggest energy waste in a freezer is the auto defrost system. Then, upright freezers can never be as efficient as chest freezers. Because every time you open an upright freezer, all the cold air spills out. With a chest freezer it's mostly contained even with the top up. The drawback of course is that it can be harder to find stuff in a chest freezer. A written list of what's in there is probably a good idea. Might do that someday.

 

[maytag85]

People always say "Old appliances use a lot of energy" but that is not so true anymore due to how poorly made today's appliances are. You use less energy in the long run with vintage appliances, because they get the job done right the first time, their performance is superior compared to modern appliances, and that is the truth. The front load Kenmore washer that I have listed in Shoppers Square, pulls 10 amps, while the Maytag A810 from the early 80's pulls 7 amps, and the matching dryer that goes with my Maytag drys faster than the Kenmore dryer that goes with it matching counterpart.

 

[amyofescobar]

Yeahhhh... but..... anyone have any data though? Because I'm still not sold that the old freezers are "energy efficient enough".

How would they compare to old fridges? I know many people have claimed that their vintage fridges are costing them $20/mo.

Various posts from: http://tugbbs.com/forums/index.php?threads/should-i-replace-my-40yr-old-freezer.94667/

- "When we bought our house, it came with an old refrigerator in the basement. We used it for a year or two and then decided to get a new one. Our energy bills DID go down quite a bit--I can't remember exactly, but in the neighborhood of $20 or $30 a month."

- "I got rid of a chest freezer in my garage that we bought 20 yrs ago with our wedding cash. I have seen a 20-30 dollar reduction in my electric bills! I figure if and when, we decide that we need one, the savings will have paid for it several times over."

Now let's just say that a modern XL chest freezer will cost $70/year (which really is estimating quite high). That's going to be just under $6 electricity, so you'd be saving $216 a year. Modern freezers easily last 5 years without repair (thats a very short estimate) so yeah, you'd eventually save $1080! I don't see how it's possibly worth it to keep an old freezer...

But, that's just going off of some bits of info I've grabbed here and there. I know not all electric rates are the same. But even if you saved HALF that, you just saved the cost of a new freezer pretty easily. Unless I did the math wrong...

 

[cadman]

I run an original (round) Deep Freeze brand freezer here as the main frozen food store. I put a kill-a-watt on it for a month a couple years ago and was surprised at how little power it used (wish I had the numbers handy, but it was a couple bucks a month, tops). Ice cream stays rock hard, and I've only had to defrost it once in all the years I've had it. I wouldn't trade it for anything made today!

 

[polkanut]

This is what Cadman posted back in March, 2014 about his Deepfreeze freezer.  "After one month's usage, total KWH is 21.83. At our all-electric winter rate of $0.05/KwH, this comes to a grand total of $1.09!" 

 

[sudsmaster]

Again, it's the automatic defrost feature on modern fridges that can be the big energy guzzler.

Example: when I bought this house in 1997, it came with a GE SXS fridge, circa 1978. I checked with GE and it was rated to consume over 1700 KWh/yr. I liked its ice maker (nice cubes) but replaced it with a KA SXS that uses about 640 KWh/yr. At the time, KA and Whirlpool were at the forefront of energy efficient fridges for the consumer market. Better insulation, more efficient lower power compressors, and better implementation of auto defrost. So for the same capacity, my new (in 2000) fridge used about 1/3 the energy of the older one.

Now in the garage I have an even older GE, circa 1948. It's probably about 16 cu ft with one of those tiny freezers that might fit a half gallon of ice cream and an ice cube tray. But as I recall when I checked, it uses about 400 KWh/yr. Again, very thick insulation, and no automatic defrost whatsoever.

Newer fridges appear to be even more energy efficient. One drawback is that they all now use non CFC refrigerants, using flammable hydrocarbons instead. This may be better for the environment but it's also more of a safety hazard for consumers.

My 15 cu ft Kenmore chest freezer uses about 350 KWh/yr. It's manual defrost, but is one of the few that has a flash defrost feature, which is great. You still have to empty it out, but when you pull a little knob in the lid, it reverses the refrigerant flow and sends hot refrigerant through the coils, which melt the accumulated ice relatively quickly. It's a great feature but kind of rare. Alternatively one could use a hair dryer or (carefully) a heat gun to get rid of the ice buildup. I find I only need to do a defrost about once a year. Usually I wait for fall when the temps in the enclosed patio where it resides are lower so that the relocated items don't thaw so quickly.

 

[panthera]

Well, our '67 Frigidaire Custom Deluxe Frostproof

Did not raise our electric bills $20 or $30 dollars a month. They stayed the same. It did, however, replace our 1948 Crossley and a one of those under the counter GE refrigerators.

 

As to energy efficiency and freezers - it's reliability in several factors which matter more than efficiency:

1) Ability to hold true '-20ºC' or below, empty or full.

2) Ability to bring warmer foods down to'-20ºC' or below fast enough to minimize damage to texture, spoilage.

3) Ability to keep food frozen during a prolonged power outage.

 

Everything else is secondary.

 

It appears that modern freezers have extremely short lifespans with designed in failure points. Why would I put several hundred if not thousand dollars worth of food into a device intentionally designed to fail and ruin my food? We have three new, energy efficient freezers, by the way, one of which is off-line and used only for the occasional defrost of the others or for when (not if) one of the others fails. It's not a situation I'm happy with and should I find a vintage freezer in great condition, one of these made-to-fail-and-ruin-your-food devices will be out the door in a New York Minute.

 

There is nothing efficient about a device built and designed to fail.

 

[polkanut]

Here's the link to Cadman's original post.  

Deep-Freeze

If all goes according to plan, this Deep-Freeze freezer will be coming home with me tomorrow. I saw a thread not that long ago with advertising for the double cylinder model but was looking for more info. I was curious if anyone in the club had either model. Is there any way to ID the year...

www.automaticwasher.org

 

[yogitunes]

heres a factor in many newer fridges and freezers that may be placed in an unheated area like a garage....

many people use one as a spare fridge, or beer cooler....or just for space constrictions, the freezer is placed in the garage....

in any case, theres a built in device that it wont allow it operate outside of normal indoor temps....

I have a few that were given to me, with the issue they stopped working....discovered they were used in a garage setting.....once placed inside, they work fine.....

in hence, people who discover this are searching for older fridges...mostly from the 80/90's....for use in a garage...

if it aint broke, don't fix it....or weigh out the benefits of fixing versus buying new.....

the one time I seen a drastic price change in electric bills was as a blind discovery the thermostat of the freezer kept it running 24/7....once changed out, the bill dropped by 25.00....

various ideas can cause a freezer to use more/less energy.....age, condition, seals, insulation.....but in any case, a full unit will operate less than one with only a few items inside....

a lot of people place jugs of water in a freezer to fill empty space, and help keep things cold....

 

[sudsmaster]

As I understand it, chest freezers are OK in an unheated area. However a standard fridge is not. That's because if the temp in the unheated area drops below the set point of the fridge, then it won't run its compressor at all because it thinks everything is fine. This means that the freezer portion (generally on top) will not be chilled and will eventually reach the temperature of the refrigerator/unheated area, with food thawing and potentially spoiled.

 

[panthera]

I am not, in general, opposed to efficiency

I just think one should consider every important aspect of any particular appliance' value, not just the electric bill.

Our GE Twenty-Eight-Hundred doesn't need to have things pre-rinsed, doesn't need to be loaded with any particular care or attention and gets everything spotlessly clean and thoroughly rinsed in well under an hour.

So what if it uses more water than a more 'efficient' dishwasher which sprinkles two drops on the dishes, runs for four hours and both requires me to pre-scrub the pots and pans before 'washing' and clean them afterwards. But not, before I take apart and clean the filter, the pre-filter, the micro-filter and remove all the gunk and debris from the various spray arms and tubes.....

Ditto, freezers and refrigerators. If a modern device is reliable and efficient and manages not to be so ugly I want to boil my eyeballs in lye to remove the image, well, then - great. I can tolerate it im Keller oder in der Garage.

We use modern microwave ovens, despite their short lifespans because I LIKE having 2000 watts to get cooking done fast. Just, I don't store thousands of dollars of food in one...nor do I expect a microwave oven to keep my milk at +1ºC, which is where I like it.

 

[combo52]

Freezer Efficiency

Older crest freezers [ before around 1990 ] easily use twice the power of current new chest freezers, and there is NO evidence that current larger American built CFs will not last 20-50 years most likley without ever requiring a service call.

 

The difference in energy usage is mainly due to more efficient compressors [ and yes it is possible to substitute a modern compressor, but it takes a lot of expertise and money to do it correctly ] but the rest of the difference is insulation which is about impossible to do anything about.

 

All that said older CFs are fairly efficient compared to older FF freezers and refs, but freezers really do not have that much style and it is not likley that you would have it in the living space where it would look really cool anyway.

 

I would go for a NEW CF or upright freezer in a heart beat if you care about your utility bill or maybe just the planet.

 

John L.

 

[drhardee]

All this being said, I'm going to reserve judgement on the intelligence of (our) swapping out our 1960-something era 15 CF Kelvinator chest freezer for a 2017 "Energy Star" rated Frigidaire 16 CF FF upright freezer.

Both units were/are in a storage shed in the back yard. The Kelvinator unit worked flawlessly for umpteen years, but rust was beginning to eat a large hole in the top from rain leaking in through the roof in the much older metal shed. We replaced the 30+ year old metal shed with a stout (built on site, not prefab) wooden shed a few weeks ago, and I, after much internal teeth gnashing, went for a highly rated Frigidaire FF upright unit. I had told myself for years that when the shed was replaced, so would the freezer.

There wasn't a thing mechanically wrong with the Kelvinator freezer, it was just going to soon have a larger rust hole in the top. All we did was defrost it once a year, in the summertime. I'd unplug it and throw the lid open for a few hours. All the frozen food was safely ensconced in a neighbor's freezer during that painless process.

Modern day chest freezers look like they're made of tinfoil compared to the beefy steel construction of that Kelvinator, which we inherited from a friend when he moved across the country 20 years ago.

Time will tell if I did a stupid thing.

 

[combo52]

Hi Dave, the old Kelvinator chest freezer would have probably out lasted the new FD FF upright freezer, FF freezers have three times as many parts to fail and cause a service call and loss of ability to keep food frozen.

However you are comparing apples to oranges when you compare a manual defrost chest freezer to a no-frost upright.

You are correct that newer freezers have much thinner outer shells, but this in no real way affects function or longevity.

John L.