This year, my fridge will be old enough to vote.
In appliance-years, that means it should be ready for retirement. But it’s not. It still looks pretty good, for its age.
Is the story of my LG fridge a heartwarming tale about some miracle-of-modern-manufacturing? The little engine that could? That plucky underdog surviving against the odds?
Nope. This appliance has been ready for the scrap yard for years now. If I had insisted that everything on this worked as it did when new, it would’ve been culled before its fifth birthday.
Perhaps this has been easy to maintain then? Is this an inspiring relic of a bygone era in which appliances were built to be repaired?
I wish. Key fittings for the interior of the appliance started to go out-of-stock a decade ago. New replacement parts are a fond memory. These days, when some cheesy plastic part breaks, I don’t even bother to see if I can get a new one. I go straight for the superglue. Lots of superglue. Plus the stray bit of epoxy, foam board, and some misused pieces of common hardware.
Mostly, this is a story of attitude adjustment. Downward. It’s a case of selectively lowering my standards and expectations, as long as this fridge continues to fulfill its core mission of keeping food cold without using a lot of energy.
Plus, acknowledging the lack of alternatives. Based on what’s in the news these days, new fridges are giving low-flush toilets a run for the money in terms of consumer new-product satisfaction.
Some people will tell you that major appliances have gotten much better over the years.
Yeah, well, so has superglue.
My goal is to keep this one running until it’s old enough to buy beer. But not old enough to run for the U.S. Senate.At which point — 2030 or so — the U.S. Department of Energy should have new, higher energy-efficiency standards in place. So if I’m stuck with yet another crappy fridge, at least maybe it will be a more efficient, crappy fridge.
Or so I thought.
These days, appliance happiness is all a question of keeping your expectations in check.
Life in a static society.
In my opinion, people who pine for the good old days of (cars, appliances, …) probably didn’t spend a lot of their own time fixing them. Or they turn a blind eye to just how ridiculously inefficient or environmentally damaging those older goods were, compared to their modern counterparts.
Source: Ah, the good old days. Chevrolet Vega, left, Ford Pinto, right. Anyone with fond memories of either vehicle is clearly delusional. Plus, mid-20’s MPG, tops. Which was outstanding, for the time period.
Plus, they forget that all those devices that were total crap have long since been scrapped. Its the same reasoning that leads some people think that old log cabins were well-built, based on those that are still standing. The 99.99% that weren’t well-built turned to dust long ago.
People will hold onto inefficient devices with the idea that the energy or environmental cost of new device manufacture is a huge barrier to replacement. But, in the main, for most energy-using appliance, nine-tenths or more of life-cycle energy use is in using the appliance, and only a tiny fraction is in the manufacture and scrapping of the appliance. The outlier to that rule is for hybrid cars, where it’s still something like 75% use, 25% manufacture, with that lower ratio owing to their efficiency of operation.
All other things equal, the faster the operating efficiency improves, the more frequently it pays you to replace your old, inefficient appliances. That, from both an environmental and economic standpoint.
But if there are no such operating efficiency gains, or maybe once you’ve wrung all the operating efficiency gains out of your appliances, as long as they continue to operate efficiently, the balance shifts toward keeping them longer.
More than anything else, this, I think, explains the traditionalist “wear it out, make it do” attitude toward appliance replacement. By and large, that ethic evolved in a static world, where there were no rapid technological improvements. In that ancient world, the “business decision” to scrap an appliance was solely based on repair cost versus replacement cost. You kept things running as long as feasible, as long as they ran OK. As a metaphor, In a world of nothing but incandescent bulbs, throwing away a functioning light bulb didn’t make sense.
But the more you edge into a world where new appliances are more efficient, that business decision has to factor in reduced operating cost. Continuing the analogy, I think most of us are smart enough to figure out that lifetime costs of LEDs are vastly lower than that of incandescents. In the modern world, throwing out functioning incandescent light bulbs is a cost-saving maneuver.
But here’s the funny thing about refrigerators. Everybody agrees that modern fridges are VASTLY more efficient than older ones. And yet, all the chatter about the ever-improving energy efficiency of home refrigerators seems to stop somewhere around a decade ago.
Source: Appliance Standards Awareness Project. Annotations in red are mine.
Long-time readers of this blog will probably understand when I say that the price data on the graph above are total bullshit, if taken as any measure of what you actually have to pay to buy a fridge. This, for the exactly the same reason (“hedonic price adjustment”) that U.S. BLS data showed no change in car prices for three decades (Post #1836).
Why? Two factors. First, it seems as if the technically feasible pace of improvement has slowed. Basically, all the easy gains on efficiency were gotten early, soon after efficiency standards were first implemented in the Carter administration. Thus, the gains from (say) a typical 1970s’ fridge to a typical 2000’s fridge were enormous. The gains since 2000? Not so much.
But in addition, it’s been more than a decade since the U.S. Department of Energy issued a new set of efficiency standards for refrigerators.
But that changed last week, as the Department of Energy issued announced its proposal for new energy efficiency standards for fridges, to go into effect sometime around 2029 (reference, Federal Register, but this is not an easy or casual read. An easier-to-read version of the identical material is at regulations.gov.) The last such change appears to have occurred more than a decade ago.
(Note that, per statute, the D.O.E. many only impose standards that are, in effect, cost-effective changes. They have to be both technically feasible, and to make economic sense in the aggregate. You can quibble over their methods, but any suggestion that the folks at D.O.E. are rabid environmentalists is just not borne out by the methods. If you still don’t believe it, take a look at the detail of the new fridge standards. You can including all kinds of energy-wasting features, including (e.g.) see through doors, as long as you include them in a way that is as efficient as possible, conditional on choosing what is essentially an energy-wasting design. It’s not the D.O.E.’s job to dictate tastes. But I have to say, in this case, who in their right mind wants people to be able to see the inside of their fridge?)
I’ve been trying to find some credible source that has extended the new standards to show how they would look, on the graph above. But so far I’ve failed. All I can say is, it sure looks like fridge efficiency is asymptoting. That is, the world of refrigerators is moving away from the incandescent-versus-LED world (in which rapid replacement is good), into more of a steady-state world of modest, very slow improvements in efficiency.
The proposed 2029 standards: Big gains in fridge energy efficiency appear to be a thing of the past.
The new D.O.E. energy-efficiency proposed rule provides enough data for me to tell that we are, indeed, approaching a kind of steady-state in fridge efficiency. At least as far as these latest energy standards go. At least until there’s some radical new and feasible technology for making things cold.
Best I can tell, in roughly two decades (between the most recent rule, and this proposed rule), the DOE can find a cost-effectiveness argument for less than a 20 percent increase in fridge efficiency. (That assumes I read the tables in the proposed rule correctly, no mean feat in this case.)
Tail fins are probably optional on my next fridge. We’ll see how it looks without them.
To be honest, the likelihood that my LG fridge is going to survive to 2030 is small. But even a casual look at the data tables in the proposed rule has given me an obvious strategy for my next, unavoidable fridge purchase.
Turns out, most of the stuff I hate about my current fridge — and that’s mostly broken, anyway — also wastes energy. Put aside the sheer size of the thing. The best way for me to get an energy-efficient fridge is to buy one without all the bells and whistles. Per my calculations, just down-optioning the fridge (the vertical columns of percents, at the bottom of the table) will save more energy than 20 years’ worth of efficiency gains as embodied in the new rules (the column of percents at the far right of the table).
If you step back from it, the fridge industry in 2024 looks a lot like the car industry in 1958. There’s been such an emphasis on bigger, bolder, and sleeker, that they’ve jumped the shark.
The modern fully-featured fridge is almost a parody of itself. I say this only after studying those latest tables from the D.O.E., and noting that you can now get a side-by-side fridge/freezer, with built-in ice maker, with clear doors, with ice and cold water delivery through the door, with additional door-ettes for pulling out frequently used items, all built into your cabinetry. With slide-out party trays, wine chilling section, and so on.
It’s hard to see the basic insulated box and compressor that lurks beneath all the add-ons.
Summary
Above: Decorative simulated cold-water dispenser on my LG fridge.
We had guests a few weeks back. I saw them standing in front of the fridge, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand what they were doing. Turns out, they were trying to get cold water out of the through-the-door dispenser. Little did they know, I had given up on fixing that more than a decade ago, after having no fewer than two successful attempts that eventually broke in exactly the same place. That water dispenser, on this fridge, had long ago turned into a harmless, if energy-wasting, bit of decoration.
And as the water dispenser went, so went …
The vegetable keeper. I finally gave up replacing the useless plastic rollers when, after multiple failures, the parts were no longer available. A sheet of foam board and some metal trim currently fill the gap left when I finally pulled those out and threw them away.
The plastic door on the party tray, which, after the second replacement, is now a once-a-year straight-to-superglue repair.
The lovely stainless-steel door handle on the bottom freezer, originally held on by a 10-cent custom plastic part (no longer available), currently held on by a big lump of JB Weld two-part epoxy.
The plastic door latches on those oh-so-trendy stainless-steel french doors. The key internal plastic part is no longer available. The doors stay shut through the magic of magnetism, and by me yelling if somebody doesn’t push the fridge door all the way shut.
You get the drift. Pretty much everything that makes this a “distinctive” appliance has turned out to be a maintenance headache. In particular, it seems like every moving plastic part on this device has been subject to repeated failures.
So for my next fridge, I’m getting one with none of that. If I can find it. And if my family approves of it. And as a bonus, by avoiding all that complication, I’ll end up with a fridge that uses much less electricity than the monster currently lurking in my kitchen.
In fact, now that I know fridges are unlikely to get much better in the near term, my attitude toward this old LG is already changing.
For now, the little green number says zero, which means it’s still keeping the freezer adequately cold. I’ll continue to invest in superglue even as I scope out my alternatives.
The moment it no longer cools food efficiently, I’m opting for something simpler and more efficient. Which is going to to mean something simpler. Because I can no longer count on the march of progress to hand me a radically more efficient fridge each time I replace an old one. Those days appear to be over, until such time as some completely new technology takes over home refrigeration.
