Impact of product load and thermostat setting in the energy consumption of a household refrigerator
Bernardo Junqueira Murta1; Pedro Laender1; Luiz Machado1; Ricardo Nicolau Nassar Koury1; Antonio Augusto Torres Maia1
1 Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-1668
Resumo
Domestic refrigerator is one of the most energy consuming home appliances, being responsible for up to 30% of the total energy usage in a regular house. The internal temperature of the refrigerator can be adjusted by changing the thermostat position. This adjust is performed by the user, considering only his perception about the requirements of refrigeration of the products. By adjusting the thermostat, the internal temperature set point and the on/off profile is changed. Since the energy consumption of the refrigerator is influenced by the duration of the on/off cycles, this procedure may be better performed if the product load is also considered. The proposal of this work is to identify the electrical and thermal characteristic curves of the refrigerator for different load of product and thermostat position, and evaluate the system power consumption for each case. Several experimental tests were performed using a different number of containers of one liter of water, representing the product load, and adjusting the thermostat in different positions. It is expected with this work to identify the best thermostat position for each product load condition, which provides inferior energy consumption without compromise the products conservation.
Palavras-chave: Household refrigerator; energy consumption; product load; on/off control