A combination of factors came together this week, leading me to use no heat whatsoever for a span of 4 days– an unusual mid-January state even in this house. The factors were:
- Above-average temps (highs 35-40F, lows 20-25)
- Above-average sunshine
- Above-average laziness on starting a fire
- Above-average use of bike trainer (warms you up fast, even in a cold house!)
So, no fire from Sunday night to Thursday night:
Ran into a couple of problems, after having the house this cool for this long. For one, the liquid dish soap solidified and became impossible to get out of the bottle. It is an all-natural product… mainstream dish soap brands probably have chemical emulsifliquifactifying agents that prevent this. Maybe I have to store it on top of the water heater or something.
Second, the contents of the freezer (above the fridge) started to thaw. This is ironic, the idea that your house can be too cold for your freezer to work, but in our cheapo fridge I’m pretty sure the freezer only turns on when/if the fridge turns on– it has no separate temperature controller. So if the house is cold, the fridge barely runs, and after a few days, the freezer starts to nudge above freezing. Obviously this isn’t good. I turned the fridge down a little (it was set rather on the warm side) and that seems to have cured the problem.
Overall average temperature so far this winter now stands at 52.5 F…
January 11, 2013 at 2:54 pm |
Brrr. Interesting problems you discovered. Sue is back. Had a wonderful busy time. Enjoyed the workshop and her time staying with Emy Thomas. I knocked a lot off my to-do list while she was gone and enjoyed a lot of loud music.
Love, Pop
February 4, 2013 at 9:14 pm |
Also, if the house is too cold a frost-free fridge freezer will not cycle properly and may thaw out your food in the freezer and spoil stuff in the fridge. IIRC the cold causes the defrost (heating) cycle to come on via some thermostat and it doesn’t get warm enough to jump out of it. May be alleviated with digital controls these days, but we have had this issue at our cabin, where during the winter we couldn’t figure out why the fridge/freezer quit working properly.
February 4, 2013 at 9:24 pm |
Yeah, no digital controls on anything around here… Seem to have solved the freezer-thawing problem, though somewhat at the expense of creating a fridge-freezing problem! Mainly just have to keep the lettuce away from the top shelf now…
March 8, 2013 at 5:42 pm |
My parents (here in the UK) were refused the sale of an upright (front opening) freezer for their garage by the UK’s largest electrical chain store, for the very reason that they don’t work properly at low temperatures. This problem doesn’t seem to exist with chest (top-opening) freezers though, my parents now have one of these in their unheated garage and it’s fine even with sub-zero air temperatures.