Single Purpose Devices
Welcome to the Single Purpose Devices community on the Fediverse!
A community dedicated to the growing trend of using devices for a singular purpose, rather than relying on (often digital) "do everything" devices, like a smartphone.
Share your favorite tricks, devices, habit changes, media formats and more!
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Top-freezer refrigerators are the most efficient and the vast majority of them don’t have any smart features. Also, they’re among the cheapest refrigerators you can buy. Costco sells four of them and they’re all under $800. Most top-load washers don’t have any smart features and should last 15 years without repair. This seems like a problem where solutions already exist, it’s just that people shun them for being the cheapest option available.
Having the freezer on top is just bad design though. People use the refrigerator way way more than the freezer, so having it on the bottom means you always have to crouch down to get anything into or out of the fridge.
Bottom-freezer refrigerators use about 100 kWh more per year than top-freezer refrigerators. That's an 11,300 GWh difference if it were applied to the ~133 million households in the US. If that electricity were being provided by natural gas power plants, they would emit 13,273,400,000 pounds of CO2 to generate that electricity. The environmental cost of that added convenience is enormous.
I don't think that is that enourmous. It's more splitting hairs. For example, we can ballpark keeping a home 1°C warmer or cooler year round to be about 500kWh per year, conservatively. That is 5x as much carbon saved at the cost of a difference in comfort that most people wouldn't notice at all.
Should people care about these savings versus the convenience of freezer position? Sure. But we can't count on individuals to really consistently give any shits about the climate. And banning freezer-on-the-bottom fridges would be... a touch politically unpopular.
A far better solution than criticizing people's fridge layout choices is just levying a carbon tax, since then any given person can decide if they want their carbon budget to go towards fridge orientation or heating and cooling or something else entirely. And better than that - there would be an economic incentive to stop buying electricity from the gas plant.