An Ambidextrous Fridge

[slowfox]

It has bugged me for a while that I've had the fridge at Castle Fox positioned in almost the worst place possible, from an energy efficiency point of view: vis, next to the radiator and immediately beneath the boiler.

So I've shifted it to the other end of the kitchen. However, this meant that the door now opened the wrong way - from being a right-hinged door that ensured that the fridge was accessible from within the kitchen as it were, shifting it to the other end meant that the door opened to create a barrier, and you had to practically exit the kitchen (at the opposite end) to be able to reach the milk.

Now, when I bought said domestic appliance, I remember flicking through the instructions (admit it, we all read the instruction manuals for white goods when they arrive) those 9 years past and seeing a subsection headed 'reversing the door hinge' or some such. Despite all the resources available to me courtesy of the highly structured filing environment that is Castle Fox's archives, I was unable to locate the fridge's Book of Words to seek further guidance, but in the end the rough hint proved enough.

First off, you need to lay the beast (carefully) on its back, remove the front feet, unscrew the lower bolt holding the door on and slide the whole door assembly downwards, so it disengages the upper pin.

It then lifts off, and you can extricate the upper bolt from the door casing and transfer it to the opposite (top left) corner of the body. Likewise, the lower hinge bolt and its dummy partner can dosey-do and swap positions, whereupon everything gets reassembled in reverse order (you just swear in different places).

All this would be so much easier if I actually possessed a non-stripped posidrive screwdriver, or a 6mm spanner. Lacking both, I had to use the needlenose pliers from my Leatherman, and also its cross-head driver. But believe me, trying to torque up fixings with that device was not easy on the hands. Ouch.

Anyway, with luck, the upshot of this transformation will be that the fridge will no longer be fighting a cooling battle against the wall of heat roiling off the kitchen radiator, and instead will be able to chug merrily along, sipping far less elctrickery than in the past. Will I notice the difference? Probably not, but at least that's one less thing to keep me awake at night.

Comments

[aome]

Heck, I'm just impressed that you can move your fridge around. American kitchens (and cabinets) are generally built with a specific location for the fridge in mind. There is nowhere else it can go, unless you do an entire kitchen makeover.

[slowfox]

There was already a sufficient space at the other end of the kitchen - this has been nagging at my mind for a long while, but the idea of having the fridge door opening the wrong way was sufficient disincentive until yesterday :-)

[linaelyn]

1) You are amazing.
2) You are an absolute nutcase.
3) It's likely the .pdf for your fridge manual is available online - we managed to find one online for the 1999 hot tub, extant at our recent vacation rental house.

4) Estel says a cursory examination of our refrigerator door shows a very similar mechanism vis which one could also swap the door. Good to know! Thankfully, ours is nowhere near the heating system nor the cooking surfaces, even; no readjustments are planned.

[slowfox]

2) You are an absolute nutcase.

I aim to please :-)

Also, I tried looking for the manual on-line, but to no avail... the fridge was bought in 2000, and the manufacturer's website seems to go back to about 2002ish.

Also, this morning I found a plastic sleeve for the upper hinge pin that should've been replaced. I've put it 'somewhere safe' for Next Time™

[sophie8]

What did the Mali dog think of your adventures? Did he try to help?

[slowfox]

In anticipation of Mali's offers of assistance, I, um, ensured he was out of the way for the duration (he likes his crate, really).

He seems mostly non-plussed by the rearrangement; not that I'd expected him to go overboard and congratulate me profusely or anything, but you'd think he'd have made some sort of mention...

[sophie8]

Does he lie in the spot the fridge used to be in? I seem to remember he liked to lie next to the radiator anyways.

[slowfox]

Actually, these days he tends to lie just outside the kitchen, in that cutaway between the dining room and kitchen, by the understairs cupboard.

He'll wait there quite happily whilst I'm cooking, and even when I've put his food out, until I give the OK (at which point all semblance of restraint vanishes).

Yesterday evening was a first - he voluntarily curled up for his evening snooze inside his crate, rather than on the chair. I actually went over to make sure he was OK, and not ailing or something, but he seemed fine. The crate, these days, is in the dining room, on the stairs side of the room, just under the thermostat.

[sophie8]

Does he often get crated anymore?

[slowfox]

It gets used a fair bit these days, yes, but he's pretty OK with that. This is in a bid to stop him hurling himself at the front window whenever a dog or cat walks past, as firstly, I'm not sure that the window's going to take much more (seriously. I may need to get some work done on it) and more pertinently, the neighbours mentioned (but didn't specifically, complain, as such) that they could hear him during the day.

[cynthia_black]

Y'know, you could have borrowed whatever tools you needed from Grimmauld Place - glad you managed it, anyhow. Hope your hands didn't get too lacerated in the process

[slowfox]

I know that I could've indeed borrowed tools from Grimmauld Place (I suspect that your abode doesn't lack for toolage, somehow), but in truth it would've been as quick to go to B&Q and get my own shiny, shiny toys tools.

But then I wouldn't have been able to write a sympathy-inducing post about how my hands were lacerated to ribbons by having to improvise with a leatherman (and why is it called a Leatherman when the things made of stainless steel??? Enquiring minds, and all that...).

[schnurble]

I haven't seen a fridge yet that couldn't swap hinges, but I'm impressed that you managed to find out HOW to do it without a manual *applauds*

Anyway, if it's 9 years old, it's most likely cheaper to buy a new fridge - nowadays they need so little energy that the price for a new, not too extraordinary fridge pays off in power cost savings after only one year. Especially when the old one was troubled by a radiator next to it, a fridge should have good enough insulation that it wouldn't make a difference as long as the doors are shut...

[slowfox]

Well, given that my electricity bill's currently about £8 per month for the whole house, and that a new fridge would be at least £100, it seems unlikely that it could pay off in energy savings alone! On the whole, I tend to use 2kWhrs of electricity per day, so the fridge can't be that inefficient, but no matter what, it's surely going to help moving it away from direct heat sources :-)

[schnurble]

Sorry, mixed up the numbers, but I looked it up again and the recommendations say an old fridge eats up about 400 kWh per year, a new once needs only about 150 kWh, with German electricity prizes this saves about 40-50 Euro per year. This is certainly not enough for a new fridge, but after a few years it would finally pay off...

Anyway, I'm highly impressed with your small power usage. We need ~7 kWh per day for TehHouse (heating excluded), and this seems to be average for a 2 person household. What's your secret? Makes having no TV really such a big difference?

[slowfox]

Well...

every single lightbulb in castle fox is low energy

The only things that are constantly running are the (ambidextrous) fridge (which was rated A for energy efficiency back when I got it), P's alarm clock (absolutely minimal current draw) and the central heating boiler (which is gas powered, but has electric controls).

EVERYTHING else in the house is turned off at source when not in use (apart from the washing machine, but only because I can't reach the socket behind it: nonetheless it's still an A-rated appliance, and uses about 1kWhr per cycle).

The PC is an ultra-low energy Atom device - I think it draws < 20 watts when in use.

No TV, as you know. But that also means no set-top box, no satellite receiver, no DVD player, no video recorder, no PVR. Also, no Hi-Fi, I just have a digital radio, which draws 9W when plugged in, but is again switched off at the wall when not in use.

No kettle, no microwave, no toaster, no food blender, no juicer, no freezer.

I time my showers, trying to keep to < 4 minutes.

This whole 'switch off at the wall' proves to be a tremendous dampener on energy usage - you really think about whether or not you want to switch an appliance on.

Taken all together, this tends to keep me hovering between 2 and 3 kWhr/day.

[schnurble]

This is amazing!
Will see if we can adapt some of these things to save energy.
We've already aquired a few socket-adapters that basically add a switch to the socket. This enables us to switch off things that don't have switches themselves instead of unplugging them. But I haven't measured how much this really saves us, and we haven't applied them everywhere possible yet either...

Now I wonder how you'd still need 2.5 earths according to the footprint calculator, since you use almost no energy and walk whenever possible.

[slowfox]

Well, don't forget that hot water and central heating are powered by gas, so the above isn't my total energy usage.

Also, these online footprint calculators are not terribly sophisticated, and a huge number of assumptions are made about the type of lifestyle I live before a figure's arrived at.

So I'm optimistic that the impact of my lifestyle is a little less than a 2.5 planet demand if the global population were to live as I do. On the other hand, I've still got a car, a PC and a laptop, and if you multiply each of those things by 6,000,000,000, then I'm sure it all scales up...