Assessing the Power and Effectiveness of a Single and Dual Purposed Refrigerator

Refrigerator is a device use to keep items at respective temperature, generally at low temperature to preserve items. To reduce the demand for electricity in a household, efforts have been made to make this device more resourceful and efficient, by utilizing the waste heat from the condenser of the refrigerator to heat water and for space heating. To achieve this, modifications are done on the normal refrigerator, but it is not known if the modification affects the power consumption and the effectiveness of the refrigerator or not. This study investigated the power consumed and the refrigeration effect of the normal and modified refrigerators with load. A major finding was that the maximum temperature achieved in the water tank with 12 liters of water was 52oC at 21600s and the refrigerating temperature of the two units was 7oC whilst reducing the total energy consumption from the two systems if used separately. The experiment proved that the refrigerator was not affected by the modifications. Therefore, the dual purposed refrigerator is technically feasible, thus making it possible to save energy and to safeguard the environment.