Either under or behind your refrigerator, condenser coils lurk. And if yours are like mine, they haven’t been cleaned in a very very long time. And that’s not a good thing. When your condenser coils are dirty, it makes your refrigerator work harder to do the same job.

Therefore, an easy way to reduce your refrigerator’s energy usage is to clean those coils every 6 to 12 months. There are some pretty good instructions here, but you can also search for them yourself. Make sure you unplug your refrigerator first! Cleaning mine for the first time since we bought our house over a year ago was not fun, but it made me feel accomplished by the end of it. And I am pretty sure that the previous owners hadn’t cleaned them in a long long time.

You might not think that cleaning the coils makes much of a difference, but the refrigerator is one of the biggest energy hogs in the typical home. Don’t encourage it to work even harder. Clean those coils.

And if your refrigerator is like mine and made in the dark ages (pre 1990) another way to reduce your energy usage is to replace it altogether. Which is on my list of things we need to do…

This frugal tip provided by paidtwice of I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 6:42 am and is filed under Frugal Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.