I know you were talking about this years ago, but I just wanted to write in that I moved into a house that has a wine cellar. The problem is that the last owners were probably paying hundreds, if under a thousand, dollars per year to keep it cool. But in Montana, we have lots of cools - even on the hottest day of the year, it's likely to drop below 50F at night.

So, I ran some ductwork into and out of the wine cellar from outdoors, stuck some 43CFM CPU fans in it (2 on input, 2 on output), and turned it on overnight.

Problems on first try: 3" duct is too small, even with power. More importantly, corrugated flexible duct is extremely resistive to air flow. And it's also apparently a great conductor. The duct traverses the ceiling of the wood room (firewood storage, so not generally heated), and comes out the other end of the tube at whatever temperature it is in the wood room.

Results: Pumping in air around freezing, almost none of those "cools" made it into the wine cellar, although tons of cools were dropped into the wood room overnight.

Lessons learned: For low power, quiet air movement, and to reduce temperature exchange, a duct to a refrigerator would need to be significant diameter (I'll be replacing with mostly 6", and 4" at the complicated bendy parts), non-corrugated (straight wall), and seriously well-insulated duct. I think it could work, but it's not as straightforward as you would think.



On Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 8:39:00 AM UTC-7, blueman wrote:
I have always wondered about this one...
Refrigerators are one of the top energy consumers in homes.
In Northern climates, the outside temperature is colder than indoor
temperature at least 6 months of the year.

Why aren't they designed with "heat" exchangers to benefit from cool if
not frigid external air?

Even in warm climates (or summers) why isn't the same principle used to
vent the warm air from the compressor & coils outside rather than
loading the AC?

Presumably this could all be done by putting the evaporator coils
outside which would in turn decrease (or eliminate if cold enough) the
draw on the compressor during winter months.

Of course, installation might be a little more expensive, but with all
the focus on green-this and green-that why isn't this being done?