thats so sad
any hoo a $ idea pay it forward or me later
Can the radiator heat exchanger thingy that sheds off heat back of your fridge be easily plumbed ducted away to be in a cooler or better air movement site eg under the house floor or outside shaded wall so it can cool more efficiently rather than on hot days working motor overtime and heating up my kitchen aswell. seems stupid to cool inside a white box while heating up your house.
so design a heat exchanger that can fitted away from a fridge to reap efficiency of shedding waste heat via lower air temperatures or even better find a way to reuse that waste heat like heat water or ??
OK, it's starting to sprinkle so I'm back as I'm scared I'll shrink in the rain :monkey:
Most built up commercial and all industrial refrigeration systems are made so that the 'condenser' is either outside in ambient air or somewhere where it uses a secondary coolant such as water, pumped away and cooled via evaporation via a cooling tower, as you see on building rooftops.
Large systems in particular use the rejected 'waste heat' for water heating or various other processes in industrial refrigeration and commercial air conditioning.
A lot of the dairy farm ice bank systems do this too as a supplement to the gas/electric hot water system.
It's just not cost effective in a domestic fridge, no one would pay the cost to do utilise the rejected heat and people want a semi-portable appliance, not necessarily built in too.
Small unitised systems such as your photo above are used just to fill a convenient spot, or where it isn't easy, desirable or possible (from a $ POV) to pipe and wire a stand alone unit outside, eg a small shop inside a large existing shopping centre.
Without getting technical, it can be a tricky design and installation exercise to sometimes pipe a unit outside.
The small supermarket I used as an example a few posts above installed a deli display and fresh produce display at the front of the shop, and I was able to convince them to install the condensing units (compressors and condensers) outside in the plant area at the back of the shop.
This required a pipe run of 48m for the deli fridge and 44m or so for the produce display, rising two stories and back down to ground level.
Without boring you too much, a refrigeration system is a closed loop. High pressure liquid refrigerant is sent from the condensing unit up the smaller of two pipes, and a low(er) pressure gas returns. While the refrigerant circulates a certain % of lubricating oil from the compressor travels with it too. While I'll install an oil separator in the discharge line on a system like this it doesn't trap all the oil, so I have to size the pipes to maintain a decent enough velocity to carry the oil without incurring too great a pressure drop and reducing efficiency, as well as design and install a trapping system to return the oil in the suction (return) line on large vertical risers.
At a rough guess doing all this would've cost
double buying two unitised systems, parking them in the shop and plugging them in, but by spending the $ initially the overall running costs are much, much lower doing it the way I did it and we haven't had a single breakdown in the eight years or so since it was all installed. (thanks in part to a gifted designer and pedantic but brilliant installer. :monkey: )
Usually unitised systems fail reasonably regularly as the condenser tends to get blocked really quickly when inside a shop from dust and crap which leads to vastly increased run times, overall loss of efficiency and premature death from overheating.
The dust is just from human traffic walking through and cleaning.
The air outside is much cleaner
(I tried uploading some photo's but nothing wants to work ATM, I think Flash is playing up in the lappy)
