Fix your refrigerator:

A lesson learned as you caught that just in the nick of time; good job. I do periodically clean my refrig coils, but I suppose not nearly enough. Could the same thing be true of the Prius radiator; i.e. loaded with summer time bugs and stuff? I suppose your advice might apply to that ocassionly.

 

Bugs and stuff? Leave it on in the autumn! Free organic grill blocking!

 

Cleaning the coils will make a fridge run way more efficiently as well! If you have a fridge more than ~10 years old, consider recycling the old one, and you will pay for a new one in a couple of years with the energy savings.

Fridges have made huge leaps in efficiency in the last few years. The mistake people make, is putting the old one in the garage as a beer fridge,, extremely wasteful use of energy.

Icarus

 

True, but because the garage is usually cooler than the kitchen, its efficiency might improve. Plus, it's easier to sneak another beer.

 

Now that's what I'm talking about!

 

Good advice Ed. I have a bottom-freezer Kenmore that was new in 2004. Thanks to 2 cats in the house, I clean the coils and fan every Spring and Fall

I can tell when cleaning is near as the fridge will start running a lot longer than usual. Clean the coils and it returns to normal

BTW: don't forget to clean the outside A/C condenser for your home. A condenser coil full of leaves, lawn clippings, and dirt will run very inefficiently.

If the dirt is really caked on then use a special HVAC coil cleaner that is safe for the dissimilar metals. I use NuCalgon products

Nu-Calgon: Products: Coil Cleaners and Sprayers

Make sure the indoor evaporator coil is clean too. Not only will it operate much more efficiently, if the indoor coil is dirty you could have mold/mildew and other nasty stuff growing inside

 

Side topic: I bet many don't know that LG is the new name for the former (Lucky) Goldstar.

I guess it's a case of good (?) marketing to ditch the old name, which didn't have a very good rep.

 

What can we do to promote this thread to the top of the heap?

Almost everybody has a fridge; almost nobody clean the coils! Not hard, just outside daily life activities. A right-shaped brush, and a vacuum to inhale the liberated 'schnutz' will get 'er done, or pretty darn close.

Behind this should follow the thread on whole-house HVAC or heat-system air filter maintenance. Totally easy; totally ignored by way too many. C'mon PriusChatters, you are not dummies, keep the heat transfer and air flow systems kinda halfway clean.

You bought them and you pay for the electricity to run them. Is this like, what, somebody else's problem?

Ed gets +100 for starting this, but let us not suppose that the work will be hard in most cases. Just clean your dang heat-transfer coils as you can. If more seems needed, call a tech and give her the gas money you have saved with your Prius this year.

 

I figured out that mine needed it when it started needing a diaper. It would leak water out on the floor.

It wasn't as bad as he described but it was pretty much packed with dust and junk.

 

One of the advantages of being married to a former appliance repairman, is that if something goes wrong, he generally can fix it. Like the time I came home from work and the refrigerator had been completely disemboweled - even the plastic lining shell was out! - as he had to replace the defrost thermostat. Five years later, it still works :thumb:

He's pretty good at keeping all those things cleared out that need airflow.
That, and we have Maytag everything.

 

I've cleaned our fridge a couple times, never as bad as EdtheFox described it, didn't need the compressed air (but I did use a broom to shake off some of the dust way back in there, I guess it depends on what you have handy). You're going to have to lay on the ground for this job. You might find some money while you're down there.

Our house A/C system was giving problems last summer. The fuse blew a couple times, so we called a guy to look at it. Turns out the exchange in the furnace was clogged and not positioned correctly, so it wasn't absorbing the house heat, so it was in the wrong state (still liquid I assume) going out to the compressor, making the compressor work harder than it should, to the point of blowing the fuse. But the fan would keep running, so we didn't know anything was wrong except the house didn't cool off.

That all came about because we had a friend of a friend replace our furnace when it went out while I was unemployed and wanted to save a few bucks (saved several actually). I could tell this guy was fighting with the ductwork, and looking at the plenum afterwards I'm not sure who won. Apparently he didn't do a very good job inside the plenum either, so now that we got that straightened out, it will be interesting to see what our electric bills will be this summer.

 

I knew that. But only because I worked for Zenith (the TV company) which was bought out by LG after making a series of bad decisions. Last I heard there were still a few Zenith engineers working on TV design in the Chicago area for LG, but it was nothing like the old days. I was in the network division - cable/satellite boxes - another one of their bad decisions - they had something like 90% of the analog set top box market, then just abandoned it because they figured digital was the next big thing, unfortunately it took several years for them to develop a working digital box. In the meantime, other companies picked up the slack in the market. Even so, this remained one of their few profitable lines, so they sold it to prop up their TV division. And that's how I became a Motorolan, for awhile.

Sorry this is off-topic, but hey, its FHOP anyway.

 

Gawd. Go back 70-80 years and Zenith was one of the 'it' radio companies. Those things can be gold now. Check your attics...

 

Yeah, before I was born, my dad used to work for Zenith Radio Corp. (I think in the Chicago area). I know he's told me about how they made some of the best TVs back then. We used to have a vacuum tube based Zenith TV. It was outdated already by the time I knew what a TV was. It took FOREVER to warm up and made for quite a nice heater.

It is sad that they went bankrupt and then got bought out by LG.

 

Kudos for posting this! I read the first post, heard my fridge turn on and start knocking, and said "Right, I meant to look into that." Mine was pretty terrible. I need to go out tomorrow for a proper brush, but I did clean everything that I could. The worst part was the the grille that's supposed to draw fresh air for the coils was probably 85% blocked by dust bunnies. Fortunately the fan spins free and the compressor wasn't too hot to touch for a two-count. If nothing else I bet I'll save a few cents on electricity next month.