Garage fridges are even worse than you think

I preface this story by saying I bought Sense to better understand how I was using energy, and as a tool to help manage my consumption. My electric bill is stupid high every month, and to add insult to injury the utility sends a usage chart every month as comparison to neighbors and energy efficient users. It’s like a running joke, because I have never met anyone who was not pegging the chart as a big user.

Like many people, who replace kitchen refrigerators, I moved the old one to the garage for spillover, drinks, convenience. The power utility is regularly saying old fridges are energy hogs and should be discarded, but I never knew how bad.

What I found was the garage fridge would run for 100 minutes, turn off for 10-15 minutes, then run for another 100 minutes, all day long! The alert I had set up to notify me when the fridge ran over a certain time was stabbing me many times every day, so much so that I disabled it, as adding more time to it didn’t help much. I was able to use the run-time data to convince my wife that we should get rid of the fridge. We already had one in the basement, plus a large wine fridge, neither of which have comparable energy usage.