Academic

Living without a fridge

By Tung Yin

Around the time I was deciding whether to move to Oregon, I read a story about a trend among some Oregonians to give up their refrigerators(!).  The theory is that a refrigerator is one of the biggest energy eaters in a house.  You can replace a fridge with frequent trips to the supermarket, a small freezer for ice, and a cooler for milk, etc. (kept cool with ice from the freezer).  Of course, whether this is actually a carbon reduction depends, I guess, on how much gas (if any) is used for those frequent supermarket trips.

Anyway, it seemed kind of crazy to me, but now I'm going to get to experience it.  We decided to replace the old fridge in our house with an EnergyStar model that will also provide chilled and filtered water and ice, etc.  Even better, an Oregon state entity, Energy Trust, was willing to pick the old fridge and give us $30 in the process for improving our energy use.  However, both Energy Trust and the appliance store would only give 4 hour pick-up/delivery windows, and we couldn't risk having the new fridge delivered before the old one was taken, so we scheduled the pick-up for today (Friday) and delivery on Monday.  In retrospect, it would've been better to have those pushed off to Monday/Tuesday, but oh well . . .

So this morning, we cleared out the freezer in the fridge and stashed all that in the upright freezer in our garage.  The remaining perishables went into a big camping cooler with blocks of artificial ice.  Fortunately, the nearest supermarket is just a mile away.

In the meantime, we're going to live like Oregonians!

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on September 25, 2009 (boomark / email).