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Originally Posted by Ryland
I've been thinking about trying to cool the coils on the back of my fridge...
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I think your idea is a very good one for a couple of reasons, one is the chimney effect, and the other is that if your chimney completely surrounded the condenser coils, you would also keep heat from radiating back into the refrigerator.
I have had some very interesting refrigerators. The one that had the most efficient design was actually the oldest. The design is frequently referred to as a 'monitor top', and it had the compressor on top of the refrigerator, and had the condenser coils up there also.
Here's a photo of a 1930s monitor top, not mine, but the same type.
One of the problems with conventional refrigerators that have the compressor in the bottom is that the heated air that rises off of the compressor and the condenser coils ends up transferring some of that heat back into the refrigerator, and the compressor must work to remove that heat too. The monitor top eliminated that problem.
Here's a very interesting approach that uses an existing freezer, with it's higher efficiency compressor and better insulation, but replaces the freezer thermostat with a refrigerator thermostat (beer cooler thermostat) and gets incredibly good results, of about $4 per year operating cost. Admittedly, he did start with a very efficient freezer.
Here's a PDF of this project, with all the details.
-AC_Hacker
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