Did you know that your automatic ice maker is evil?
Want to save the Earth? Easy, just buy a couple of ice trays. To the long list of human inventions that are wrecking global climate—the internal combustion engine, the industrial era factory—add the automatic ice maker.
Climate modelers have long known that households are far bigger contributors to global warming than most laypeople realize. For all the blame tailpipe emissions take for escalating temperatures, homes and office buildings are actually the single largest contributor to greenhouse gasses. One key reason is the 100-plus million refrigerators in America’s 111 million households. According to the Department of Energy, the standard fridge sucks up about 8% of the electricity used by all homes—a pretty big share given the dozens of big and small appliances and electronics that are also drawing juice.
According to the just-released findings, the average ice maker in the average fridge increases energy consumption by 12% to 20%….
OK, there you go, Warmists, here’s something easy to do: stop using your automatic ice maker. Just take it out. Better yet, you need to go out and purchase a new highly efficient fridge with no automatic ice maker. Double Better yet, reuse, recycle, get a used fridge. Certainly, you can do your small part to reduce anthropogenic global warming, right? Not that I actually expect you to do a blessed thing, because the Warmist viewpoint is that it is always Someone Else who has to Do Something, preferably at the barrel of a government law.
But, Time tells us the good news
NIST is thus urging refrigerator manufacturers to look closely at the design of their icemakers, insisting that there are “substantial opportunities for efficiency improvements merely by optimizing the operations of the heaters.”
That appeal to reason, NIST officials hope, will be enough. But just in case it isn’t, the Department of Energy has announced that it intends to add 84 kilowatt hours to the efficiency rating of every refrigerator equipped with an icemaker. Consumers will feel that fact in the wallet—and if manufacturers don’t scramble to improve their numbers, they soon will too.
Thanks, Government! You do all you can to make things more expensive.
I wonder if the tests took into account the number of times doesn’t open the door when getting ice for ice trays as opposed to the door staying closed when using in door or through the door ice makers.
You don’t think they would have missed such a simple calculation as that, do you?
About 66-75% of the energy comes from the heater that detaches the ice from the maker into the tray.
About 66-75% of the energy comes from the heater that detaches the ice from the maker into the tray.
But my point is that when you open the door to get trays of ice, crack the trays, dump the ice in a storage bin, close the door, refill the trays with water, open the door, put the ice trays back in the freezer and shut the door, cold air escapes.
I wonder if they had considered the energy savings from that.
Turns out they not only didn’t consider the energy savings from that, the government is guessing on the number of kilowatt hours to add to the energy sticker.
From the NIST Press Release on the study:
source: The Heat Is On: NIST Zeroes In On Energy Consumption of Ice Makers
In other words, they are guessing. It may be a somewhat educated guess, but testing only 4 freezers in a lab without real world standards and then applying the so called results across the spectrum of an appliance is ridiculous.
On the other hand, such alarmism without proper science or backing is typical of warmists.
Of course, the best solution is to have no fridge at all! That is surely the Warmist agenda, at least for Everyone Else But Themselves.