I have seen an increase in my electric bill in the past several months over last year’s usage. I am currently looking for the reason and may found it in our refrigerator. I hooked up my WattsUp Pro power monitor to it several weeks ago and found something I can’t explain yet. The standby watts is 3 (probably controller electronics and LEDs on the front panel). When the fridge runs it pulls about 190 watts not accounting for the front-end spike that probably occurs when the compressor kicks on (looks like 600-700 watt momentary spike). Since the WattsUp has data logging capabilities, I can collect about a weeks worth of data before it rolls over. I pulled that off after about 4 days and what I see in the graphs is concerning. The fridge is on for 15 mins and sleeps for 30 mins. It repeats this pattern continuously all day every day. So this means it is pulling 190 watts for 8 hours of every day regardless of how we use it. Not sure how to convert that to KWH per day. So I decided that maybe the coils are clogged with dust and should be cleaned. There was a lot of dust build up but cleaned that out with a brush and compressed air and put the WattsUp back on for another 4 days. No difference. The same exact pattern remains. I don’t expect this is normal. If it is not normal, then I need top figure what could cause this and if it can be fixed…
-Cliff