Just bought an old looking freezer, too expensive to run?

timbon_2

Not sure if this was a mistake or not but it looks fairly old and not im thinking its going to cost too much to run!

It is a freestanding freezer and about 5ft tall, inside there is a label that says it uses 220-240v, 1.2 amp and underneath it says the nominal input is 167w, is this going to cost a lot?

I rang the person back who i bought it off and he said it has a thermostat so it wouldnt cost so much and that it would just switch itself off when needed, im pretty sure all freezers do this!

kwatt

You'd need to work it out but as a very rough guide if it has an energy class rating there's a rough guide here to how many Kwh each will use.

The short of it is though, a lot of the energy use thing is scaremongering and it does vary a lot depending on the conditions more than any other factor.

Think on it like MPG for cars.

If you put it in a conservatory then in summer it will run much longer as it has to work harder. Restrict ventilation and you get the same result.

Put it in the correct conditions and it will run more or less as advertised.

But an older one will almost invariably use more energy.

HTH

K.

The_ICT_Engineer

Just multiple 167Kw by the price charged per unit of electric. (ie: 167 x 0.15 = £25.05) This will give you an average cost per year.

The actual figure depends on ambient temperature where the freezer is kept. Cooler average room temperature = less running time = less running cost. Ensure you have good airflow behind the freezer.

27col

Why would you buy a second hand freezer and then worry about whether you can afford to run it. Seems a strange way of spending your money.

timbon_2

To be honest i only bought it because it was cheap and i assumed the running cost wouldnt be extraordinarily expensive, i guess at 167 w input, it is kind of like 1.5 times the amount of a 100w light bulb?

So lets just say the freezer is on 15 hours a day, it obviously switches off due to the thermostat, it would cost:

0.167 kw x 14p = 2.3p/hour
2.3p x 15 hours = 34.5p/day
34.5 x 365 days = £125.92/year

I guess thats really expensive if its correct!

Can anyone confirm if i have done this right?

fluffymuffy

timbon wrote: »

Can anyone confirm if i have done this right?

You calculations look sound enough to me.

Can you keep it in a garage or outbuilding? It will be very cheap to run in the winter and you can switch it off in the summer.

Also keeping it full will help. Use plastic milk bottles of water to fill any spaces. It acts as a thermal flywheel.

Norman_Castle

Markings on electrical appliances are maximums provided to avoid overloading sockets. Your freezer will probably use close to 167 watts when the compressor is running. However, this will probably only run for approx 5-25% of the time. This depends on many factors such as how you use it and where it is.
I've used a plug in energy monitor on my fridge. It costs approx £35 per year.

Ben84

It probably isn't that bad. I have a very old under counter fridge with ice box (from about 1980 we think) and we believe it costs about £1.70 a week. More than a new one, but hardly extremely costly.

We can manage the cost fine and as for the environment, making a fridge consumes a lot of energy and resources so it would probably be a long time before energy savings from using it paid off. Besides, the CFCs inside it are doing no environmental damage inside it in our kitchen, while if it was thrown out they would eventually leak out.

27col

The vast majority of scrap freezers have the CFC's removed at the recycling depot they go to. The only exception would be if they failed due to a gas leak.

Ben84

27col wrote: »

The vast majority of scrap freezers have the CFC's removed at the recycling depot they go to. The only exception would be if they failed due to a gas leak.

Thanks, that's interesting. I had believed they were crushed and landfilled, which would leak the CFCs. However, do you know what do they do with the CFCs when they remove them, perhaps they clean them up and reuse them or destroy them somehow? Destroying them could be hard however, as they're pretty inert, which incidentally is also one of the reasons why they're so useful.