Hoping to tap the collective knowledge for ideas. I'm stumped.
Parents have a 3-year old Whirlpool refrigerator, 21 cuft or thereabouts,
that runs excessively. Certainly runs more often than my 7 year old Maytag.
At first I wrote this off as simply expected behavior; thinking that newer
Energy Star units are designed with smaller, more efficient compressors that
run more frequently but still save money. But I think something else is
going on.
Twice my parents have had techs come out to examine the fridge on the basis
that it was running too frequently. Neither could explain the behavior but
one replaced the thermostat and the other replaced both the thermostat and
the defrost controller. No change. To me, this lent support to
my idea that the fridge was operating normally. But now I'm no longer
convinced.
Today, I lent my parents my Kill-A-Watt meter. In 9 hours, with nobody home,
the fridge drew 5.3 KWh. That works out to 14 KWh/day or over 5000 KWh/year.
According to a quick Google search, that's about 4x higher than what a typical
22cuft 3-year-old fridge should be drawing and about 10x higher than what an
Energy Star-rated fridge of that vintage should be drawing.
Neither the fridge nor the freezer are set to an abnormally low temperature and
the house isn't abnormally warm (72-74 degF). I don't detect any air leaks
around the door seal nor do I feel any cold spots around the fridge's exterior
that would suggest faulty insulation. The fridge shipped with an automatic
ice maker but I'm told my parents have disabled it.
I don't know a whole lot about refrigerators so I'm at a loss to explain
what's going on. Any ideas what might be going on?
JM
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