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Just add ice cubes to the long list of things that cause you know what!
Today, according to Time Magazine, the Church of Global Warming Moonbats have picked their next target – Mixed Drinks. They have declared that making ice cubes causes global warming. Not all ice cubes, but those made by your refrigerator’s automatic ice maker.
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.
That energy gluttony has always made refrigerators prime targets for design improvements and most of the big manufacturers have made real progress in squeezing every last bit of efficiency out of their machines – especially since they know that cash-strapped consumers are paying closer attention than ever to energy-consumption ratings before making their purchasing decisions. The problem is, those ratings are not always terribly precise. In general, refrigerators will simply get a gross energy-use score, without anyone examining just which components in the overall machine are driving the numbers up or down. Ice makers have thus long gotten a pass, but analysts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently decided to give them a closer look – and they got a surprise when they did.
According to the just-released findings, the average ice maker in the average fridge increases energy consumption by 12% to 20% – a whole lot of juice for an appliance that is in operation 24 hours a day from the moment you first plug it in till the moment you replace it a decade or more later. The reason that number was so unexpected was that the large majority of refrigerators are refrigerator-freezer combinations anyway – which means they’re freezing water and making ice no matter what. So why should the simple business of automating the process be so energetically expensive?
The answer, it turns out, is the tiny motor inside the freezing system that’s used to release the bits of ice from the mold and dump them into a tray. A motor that is designed to operate in so cold a setting needs an internal heater to keep it from freezing up, and heating elements require a lot of power – in this case, roughly three fourths of the total additional energy the ice maker uses.
darcprynce
Dave C
Gatordoug
If a refrigerator’s ice-maker sucks up the energy, just think about how much juice a Chevy Volt uses… yet, according to Obama, electric/hybrid cars are such a good idea that the government needs to invest billions and billions of dollars in them. Weird.
Ah, the inconsistent ideology of the Left!