fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this faulty?

[chriscam]

I bought a second hand tall fridge freezer from british heart foundation, it has no brand or model number, and it seems to be using around £50 per month in electricity.

The thisismoney website says an average fridge feezer should consume around £62 pear year. Therefore would this be highly indictive that this is faulty fridge freezer?

To find out exactly how much power this fridge freezer is using i have bought a plug energy monitor which will arrive tomorrow so i will update this post then on exact usage.

Can any fridge freezer experts give some advice on this please?

Thanks

[electrofix]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

as units get older and loose gas the compressor will run longer to get it cool. it can get to a point that the unit is running none stop and therefore will consume more power

Dave

[kwatt]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

Even faulty, I doubt very much it’d even get close to using that amount of energy.

Unless of course it’s the size of a garage.

K

[chriscam]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

Its hard to tell exactly how much power the fridge freezer is using which is why i have purchased the energy monitor as that will give an exact value for the appliance; you plug the appliance into it, and then plug the monitor into the plug socket.

What i do know though is that i turned off everything in my flat, except a new tv, a youview box, and a energy efficient light bulb, and the fridge freezer. I let my credit run out and put on emergency credit as that does not add the daily standing charge so you only get charged for electricity and nothing else.

In 2 hours it used 13 pence, which is 13 x 12 (hours) = £1.56 per day or £46.80 per month eg 1.56 x 30.

I am fairly confident that the other items do not use that much electricity, and therefore that only leaves the fridge freezer.

I will confirm exact usage once the power monitor arrives.

[chriscam]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

It is a normal sized tall fridge freezer.

[kwatt]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

Normal fridge freezer, no way it’s using that.

I am well aware of energy monitors, normal, smart and automated systems such as Z-Wave, etc. and it will give you a good indication if not 100{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} exact.

Or you’re paying way too much for electricity which is more likely by the sound of it.

K.

[electrofix]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

1 have you turned off the fridge to see if anything else is drawing power ?

2 if the freezer is running properly it will turn on and off. that means if you take an odd hour it might run a lot or a little. so you hour may have run a lot. unless you take an average you will not know

have you checked what price you are paying per unit?

Dave

[chriscam]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

It turned out that the fridge freezer was using between 70-100w.

When i turned it on after it being off for a few hours it used 100w which reduced to 70w once it had been on for a while.

I am not sure what that equates to electricity, is that 70 watts per second, it does seem to update/change every second so i guess so. And i guess KW stands for 1000 x Watts. So if i am correct then i just need my KW charge for electricity from British Gas to work out what this is on terms of cost.

I have measured some of other items in the flat and its seems these are using a lot more than i anticipated, such as tv stuff which is using about 60w, nearly as much as the fridge freezer.

Also the 3x computer workstations + GPUs are using nearly 900w!! Each system has twin zeon processors (8 core total) running Nvidia Quadpro GPUs on 100{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} load running grid computing.

So because of all this I should not really be worried about the fridge freezer as it does not seem too bad.

[electrofix]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

electricity is measured in kilowatt hours or 100watts for 1 hour

or 100watts for 5 hours

with that in mind if your fridge draws 70 watts that 1000 / 70 = 14.29

which mean it will use 1 unit of power in 14.29 hours

based on 17p per unit and a month of 30 days
hours in a month 30 * 24 =720

no of units per month 720 / 14.29 = 50.38
price 17p * 50.38 = £8.56

and thats based on the motor running all the time which if its working ok it should not

Dave

[kwatt]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

In other words, the fridge ain’t your problem.

The workstations probably are though as they’re going to be burning more than ten times that alone before you look at anything else and, they are running all the time from what you say.

K.

[chriscam]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

Yeah I agree the WS are costing excessive amounts. (see below)

My British Gas Unit cost is 13.10p /KWh

So using your calculations above,

That gives: 13.10 * 50.38 = £6.60 per month?

And the workstations,

1000/900 = 1.11
720/1.11 = 648.65
13.10 * 648.65 = £84.97 per month?

Is this correct, (excluding daily charge) if the energy monitor is reporting on average 70 & 900 watts per second for the examples?

But what your also saying is that fridge freezers should not be constantly using electricity (as they turn off and on), hence it would indicate that the appliance is faulty?

Would this fault be able to be fixed? And if so what kind of cost would be involved?

Thank you so much for eveyone’s help so far, it is very much apreciated.

[kwatt]

Re: fridge/freezer costing £50pm in electricity. Is this fau

If it’s frost free it’ll run 80-90{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of the time it’s plugged in.

If non-frost free then it’ll be about 65-80{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of the time it’s on.

So it’s all too probably not faulty.

K.

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