Green Options

[Creative Commons photo by sarae]

Your dishwasher is spic and span, and it’s starting to make your cluttered refrigerator look a little bit…well…gross. Don’t despair! We’ve got you covered with some Earth-friendly fridge-cleaning tips. Not only does cleaning out the fridge keep things sanitary, you can do your part to make it more energy efficient!

Australian researchers have figured out a cool new way to tackle the threat of global warming, by setting up a network of ‘talking’ fridges.

But wait, the idea isn’t as crazy as it might sound. The fridges feature cutting-edge technology enabling them to communicate with each other via a network to share and store energy from renewable energy sources such as solar panels or wind turbines.

According to inventor, Sam West, “The fridges are designed to talk to each other, negotiating when it’s a good time to consume electricity and when it’s better not to.”

Live in the UK? You may be the lucky recipient of a free “intelligent” refrigerator. 3,000 fridges that adapt power usage based on the demands of the electrical grid will be given away by the government next year. According to a report from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, the dynamic demand fridges could potentially save 2 million tons of carbon each year and £222m.

Ice cream lovers of the United States, rejoice. Greenpeace and Ben & Jerry’s have teamed up to bring the first climate-safe ice cream freezer to the USA. The Greenfreeze refrigerator eliminates the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), an extremely potent greenhouse gas that has 1,400 times the global warming impact of CO2.

Malcolm McCulloch, an electrical engineer at Oxford, has completed a prototype of a refrigerator designed by Albert Einstein.  This refrigerator does not use Freon, a toxic greenhouse gas worse than carbon dioxide, or electricity. The Einstein fridge was patented in 1930, uses pressurized gases (ammonia, butane, and water) to keep food cool, and contains no moving parts.

Via:  The Guardian

Albert Einstein is probably most remembered by the public for his General Theory of Relativity, but how many remember his 1930 invention of a refrigerator that used no electricity?  I wasn’t there when it was introduced, but I knew several people who had one, and they weren’t all that happy with it, primarily because it wasn’t that efficient.

The idea was great, it operated without electricity, using ammonia, butane and water.  The principle being that water boils at a much lower temperature at high altitudes where air pressure is lower than it does when you’re at sea level, where air pressure is higher.

Malcom McCulloch, an electrical engineer at Oxford University in the U.K., is leading a team in a three year project to produce appliances that can be used in places without electricity.  Or, for that matter, places with electricity, why not?.  That’s when McCulloch latched on to Einstein’s fridge idea.

Einstein’s concept, shown in the image above, works thusly.  At one side is the evaporator, a flask that contains butane. “If you introduce a new vapor above the butane, the liquid boiling temperature decreases and, as it boils off, it takes energy from the surroundings to do so,’ says McCulloch. ‘That’s what makes it cold.”

Editor's note: This week, Lighter Footstep's Chris Baskind shares some tips for making your refrigerator run more efficiently. This post was originally published on May 30, 2007.

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