In many American kitchens, the refrigerator is one of the most essential appliances. It stores food, keeps it cool and extends its life, which makes home cooking and food storage much easier.
At the same time, refrigerators also gobble up a lot of energy. They can create an utter disaster if you leave the door open or lose power. It’s also easy to lose track of leftovers, with food items migrating to the back and becoming inedible.
Here are four simple strategies you can use right now to minimize the energy cost, replacement cost and food loss cost of your refrigerator.
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Fill it with jugs of water. If you’ve ever lost power for a while, you’ve probably had food spoil resulting from the gradual temperature change inside your fridge. There’s a simple way to (somewhat) protect against that and make your refrigerator less prone to food spoilage. Simply put several jugs of cold water in your refrigerator, so that there’s not much excess space.
Think of a swimming pool and how it holds the temperature of the environment around it. If you have a cold pool on a hot day, it takes a long time for that water to get warm enough to swim in. It might even take a few days. The air changes temperature faster than the water does.
The same principle is true with your refrigerator. If you have lots of water jugs in your fridge and leave the door open, unplug the refrigerator or lose power for a while, the fridge will stay cool because of all of the cold water in it, which takes much longer to warm up than air does. So in order to minimize the chance of food spoilage, fill your fridge with jugs of cold water. If you need more space, pull out one of those jugs and use it around the house. If you have empty space, refill the unused jug with cold water and put it back in there.
Consider doing the same thing in the freezer for the same reasons. A freezer full of items is less likely to suffer spoilage, so fill the unused space with water jugs. An extra advantage: You can use those jugs for ice when needed. Simply smash the jug or sit a full jug in a cooler when you need to use it.
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Pull your refrigerator forward an inch or two. Most refrigerators are jammed back against the wall in order to provide maximum floor space in the kitchen. The problem is that having your refrigerator coils against the wall minimizes airflow to those coils, which means that your refrigerator has to work extra hard to stay cool.
You can solve this by pulling your refrigerator forward an inch or two. Most refrigerators are designed to perform most efficiently when there’s a two-inch gap between the wall and your refrigerator, and having the fridge against the wall significantly reduces efficiency and causes your refrigerator to run more, which simultaneously eats up more energy and causes more wear and tear on your fridge, meaning it’ll break down sooner. Two inches can make all the difference.
Most refrigerators aren’t hard to move. It just takes a small amount of horizontal force. But to avoid scratching the floor, you can buy floor glides at any hardware store or slide the appliance onto a thin piece of Masonite, also available at hardware stores.
Vacuum the coils behind your fridge regularly. This is a simple project that takes an hour at most. Simply slide your fridge out from against the wall, vacuum the coils gently to remove all of the dust, then slide it back into place.
This little tactic bumps up your refrigerator’s energy efficiency substantially. The coils at the back of your fridge need to have maximum exposure to air in order to operate efficiently and cool your fridge. If there’s dust covering those coils, your refrigerator has to run a lot longer to achieve the same cooling effect, which eats energy and, again, adds wear and tear to your fridge.
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Keep a set of washable markers nearby for leftover management. You need seven of them for this trick — the colors of the rainbow work nicely. Designate each color to match a day, so maybe have red represent Monday, orange represent Tuesday, yellow represent Wednesday (swapping brown for yellow can help with visibility) and so on.
When you put some leftovers in the fridge, mark the container with one of those washable markers with a big obvious doodle, where the marker matches the day you stored it. So if you put leftovers in the fridge on Monday, mark it clearly with a red marker. You can mark anything: the plate, the bowl, the aluminum foil, the container. (If a container is solid black, put a little bit of masking tape on it and draw a dot on that masking tape.)
Then, when you’re looking in your fridge, you can quickly identify how old everything is. On Thursday, everything with a red, orange and yellow dot is fine. Everything with a green, blue, indigo or violet dot should probably get tossed. On Sunday, everything with a green blue, or indigo dot is fine. Everything with a violet, red, orange or yellow dot should probably go. You can also use a black marker and write a letter indicating the day, but using colors means you can just scribble or draw a big line on it, which is easier to do. It’s also easier to recognize the different colors at a glance.
These four strategies enable you to get the most value out of your fridge by maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing leftover waste.
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4 Strategies to Get the Most Value Out of Your Refrigerator originally appeared on usnews.com
