Should You Repair A 15 Year Old Refriderator?

Who Invented the Fridge?

The modernistic fridge is a recent invention. (Image credit: Everett Collection/Shutterstock)

Refrigeration is the process of creating cooling weather condition by removing heat. It is generally used to preserve food and other perishable items, preventing foodborne illnesses. It works because bacteria growth is slowed at lower temperatures.

Methods for preserving nutrient by cooling have been around for thousands of years, merely the modern refrigerator is a recent invention. Today, the need for refrigeration and air conditioning represent nearly 20 percent of energy consumption worldwide, according to a 2022 article in the International Journal of Refrigeration.

History

The Chinese cutting and stored water ice around chiliad B.C., and 500 years later, the Egyptians and Indians learned to leave earthenware pots out during cold nights to make ice, according to Continue Information technology Cool, a heating and cooling company based in Lake Park, Florida. Other civilizations, such as the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews, stored snow in pits and covered them with various insulating materials, co-ordinate to History magazine. In various places in Europe during the 17th century, saltpeter dissolved in water was found to create cooling weather condition and was used to create water ice. In the 18th century, Europeans nerveless ice in the winter, salted it, wrapped information technology in flannel, and stored it underground where it kept for months. Ice was even shipped to other locations around the world, according to a 2004 article published in the journal of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).

When water ice wasn't available or applied, people used cool cellars or placed goods underwater, according to History mag. Others built their own water ice boxes, according to Keep It Absurd. Wooden boxes were lined with tin can or zinc and an insulating material such every bit cork, sawdust, or seaweed and filled with snow or water ice.

Evaporative cooling

The concept of mechanical refrigeration began when William Cullen, a Scottish medico, observed that evaporation had a cooling effect in the 1720s. He demonstrated his ideas in 1748 by evaporating ethyl ether in a vacuum, according to Top Mechanical Partnership, a plumbing and heating company based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Oliver Evans, an American inventor, designed but did not build a refrigeration car that used vapor instead of liquid in 1805. In 1820, English scientist Michael Faraday used liquefied ammonia to cause cooling.

Jacob Perkins, who worked with Evans, received a patent for a vapor-compression cycle using liquid ammonia in 1835, according to History of Refrigeration. For that, he is sometimes called the "father of the refrigerator."

John Gorrie, an America doctor, also built a machine like to Evans' blueprint in 1842. Gorrie used his fridge, which created ice, to cool down patients with yellow fever in a Florida hospital. Gorrie received the outset U.S. patent for his method of artificially creating water ice in 1851.

Other inventors around the globe connected to develop new and improve existing techniques for refrigeration, according to Peak Mechanical, including:

Ferdinand Carré, a French engineer, developed a fridge that used a mixture containing ammonia and water in 1859.
Carl von Linde, a German scientist, invented a portable compressor refrigeration machine using methyl ether in 1873, and in 1876 switched to ammonia. In 1894, Linde also developed new methods for liquefying large amounts of air.
Albert T. Marshall, an American inventor, patented the showtime mechanical refrigerator in 1899.
Renowned physicist Albert Einstein patented a refrigerator in 1930 with the idea of creating an environmentally friendly refrigerator with no moving parts and did not rely on electricity.

The popularity of commercial refrigeration grew toward the end of the 19th century due to breweries, according to Acme Mechanical, where the first refrigerator was installed at a brewery in Brooklyn, New York, in 1870. By the turn of the century, nearly all breweries had a refrigerator.

The meatpacking industry followed with the first refrigerator introduced in Chicago in 1900, co-ordinate to History mag, and nigh xv years later, about all meatpacking plants used refrigerators.

Refrigerators were considered essential in homes by the 1920s, co-ordinate to History magazine, and more than than 90 percent of American homes had a refrigerator.

Today, nearly all homes in the Us — 99 pct — accept at least one refrigerator, and about 26 percent of U.S. homes take more 1, according to a 2009 study by the U.S. Department of Energy.

How does a refrigerator piece of work?

Refrigerators today work very similarly to refrigerators over a hundred years ago: by evaporating liquids, according to SciTech. Refrigerants, the liquid chemicals that are used to absurd, evaporate at low temperatures.

The liquids are pushed through the fridge through tubes and brainstorm to vaporize. Every bit the liquids evaporate, they carry heat away with them as the gases travel to a coil on the outside of the refrigerator, where the rut is released. The gases are returned to a compressor, where they become liquid again, and the cycle repeats.

Refrigerator safety

Early refrigerators used liquids and gases that were flammable, toxic, highly reactive or a combination, co-ordinate to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Thomas Midgley, an American engineer and chemist, researched safer options in 1926 and found that compounds containing fluorides appeared to exist a great deal safer. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), marketed by DuPont every bit Freon, grew in popularity, until the compounds were found to be harmful to the ozone layer in the atmosphere nearly 50 years subsequently.

Most of the refrigerators manufactured today use hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), co-ordinate to the California Free energy Commission, which are safer than CFCs and many other options, simply nevertheless not the most ideal. The EPA keeps an updated listing of acceptable materials that can be used in refrigerators as a coolant.

Refrigerators go on food safety, just simply if operating at proper temperatures, according to the U.S. Nutrient and Drug Assistants. When refrigerators aren't kept cold enough, harmful bacteria inside perishable foods grow apace and can contaminate the nutrient, causing mild irritations to severe food poisoning if information technology is eaten. The FDA recommends that a refrigerator's temperature be set at a maximum of 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 degrees Celsius); too, the refrigerator should not exist non overly packed, and spills should be promptly cleaned.

Refrigerators of the future

New technologies in refrigeration include solid-state refrigerators and refrigerators that use magnets.

Traditionally, refrigerators take relied on large compressors, which generate a lot of heat and can easily oestrus upwardly a room, said Tony Atti, CEO of Phononic, an electronics manufacturer based in Durham, North Carolina. The company gets its name from the theory of phonons, quantum particles that behave heat.

Solid-land refrigerators use the entire surface of the fridge to very slowly and deliberately dissipate the heat then that an increase in temperature of the room is practically nonexistent and the surface of the refrigerator is absurd to the touch, Atti told Live Scientific discipline. These refrigerators too accept the benefit of beingness gratuitous from harmful materials and loud operations, likewise as being more accurately controlled.

Another new type of refrigerator uses magnets to provide a vibration-free, silent, environmentally friendly refrigerator. Built past Haier in conjunction with BASF and Astronautics, the magnetic refrigerator uses a concept based on the magnetocaloric effect, discovered in 1917 by Pierre Weiss and Auguste Piccard, French and Swiss physicists respectively, according to an article by Andrej Kitanovski, et al., a group of scientists from Slovenia and Denmark, in 2022 and published by Springer International Publishing.

According to a press release on PR Newswire, proper ruby wine storage has very specific needs in guild to maintain the sense of taste and quality. The Haier refrigerator uses magnetocaloric oestrus pump (using a fabric that heats up in a magnetic field and cools downward when information technology is not) with a water-based coolant, co-ordinate to a news release on BASF, which relies on abundant and affordable raw materials. The magnetic refrigerator as well uses up to 35 percent less ability than traditional refrigerators.

Additional resources

MIT News: Explained — Phonons
Phys.org: Einstein'due south Light-green Fridge Making a Comeback
California Energy Commission: How Does a Refrigerator Piece of work?

Since loftier school, Rachel Ross has been looking up toward the stars to sympathise how the universe works. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of California Davis and a master's caste in astronomy from James Cook University. Rachel has spent several years making her passion for astronomy and science education into a profession. She has even held the position of Jedi master at an observatory. And no matter what anybody says, the last respond is always 42 and duct tape is useful in all situations.