In the summer the warm exhaust from the fridge gets dumped into the kitchen along with heat from cooking. Then the cooling system has to work harder, or if there is no cooling system it just means less comfort and fans running more.
So I have to ask, why don’t refrigerators have a duct so the warm air can be vented outside in the summer?
In the winter I actually adjust the fridge temp to be colder so food lasts longer because the output is beneficial anyway.
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How would you implement such a system without making it so complex that utility and versatility aren’t severely compromised? The efficiency gains would have to be pretty substantial to overcome the efficiency lost to making the refrigerators heat pump system more complex. It’s not like there is some kind of exhaust port on the back of a fridge that you can pipe outside. Have you ever looked at the back of a fridge?
Technology Connections on YouTube has several videos that explain heat pumps of various kinds: a refrigerator, Home heat pumps playlist.
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Wouldn’t really make much difference, see the Technology Connections video, I think he even addresses this
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If you had an exhaust vent, you’d need an intake, or else you’d be exhausting cooled interior air, which would then be mad up with exterior air intrusion somewhere (see Technology Connections video on portable air conditioners. Single hose units have the same issue)
Basically, the fridge doesn’t make much difference to the internal heat load of a house. The air exchanged when a person leaves/returns is probably orders of magnitude greater influence, or even using a few incandescent light bulbs.
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shouldn’t the refrigerator be sealed so external heat doesn’t affect it? Maybe im misinformed on how that works
It’s just a heat pump. Essentially, and without going into how, heat is pumped out of the insulated box of the refrigerator and dumped into the space outside that box i.e. your kitchen. The house’s air conditioner does essentially the same thing on a larger scale, pumping heat outside your house. Heat pumps can work in reverse too for warming your house. The OP is concerned that waste heat from a refrigerator needs to be handled by the house AC and feels that it might be more efficient to pump that heat directly outside the house.
The question was not about the heat of the kitchen affecting the fridge. While keeping its inside cool, the fridge produces some heat that it has to dump somewhere. Standard kitchen fridges just dump this heat into the kitchen. OP proposed connecting the fridge to the outside of the house to dump the heat there.
