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1 year ago
scott@loves.tech
My small refrigerator in my computer room seems to be sympathetic to the outside temperature, regardless of what the inside temperature is. We have kept the thermostat set at the same temperature inside, and the computer room tends to be warmer than the rest of the house, but if it gets cold or freezes outside, my little refrigerator decides it is going to freeze all of the drinks on the top half of the fridge. And when it warms up outside, the fridge goes back to normal. How that would be connected is beyond me.
1 year ago
dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com
Here is a hypothesis for you. The fact that the interior fridge temperature varies implies that it doesn't have a thermostat, but simply puts some fixed (or perhaps variable, based on a dial, but not based on temperature) effort to cool. While the ambient room temperature may seem the same to you, I'm sure it cycles based on your home heating system. The fridge is one of the things heating that room. During the cooler side of the range of the room, the fridge is probably able to transfer more heat for the same amount of effort. When it is colder outside, there is probably more time spent with the room at a lower temp, resulting in more time with the fridge cooling more efficiently, and thus to a lower temperature. If it is only freezing the drinks in the bottom half, that seems to imply that you are right at the freezing point, as there is probably only a small difference in temperature between different parts of the fridge. This in turn means that there only needs to be a small drop in average fridge temp between freezing nothing and freezing half the drinks.

What do you think?
1 year ago
scott@loves.tech
Come to think of it, the fridge is against an exterior wall, so it might be affected by the outside temperature more than I think.

And, I think you are right. Even though the house's thermostat is set to the same temperature, that does not mean the temperature is the same throughout the house. Normally the computer room gets pretty hot, especially in the summer, no matter what you set the house's thermostat to. And in winter, it isn't nearly as hot. So there definitely is a temperature difference, now that I think about it.

I did adjust the dial in the fridge to a lower temperature. I changed it from 7 to 6, whatever that is supposed to mean. Hopefully it will stop freezing my drinks. :-)
1 year ago
dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com
If nothing else, it made for an interesting thought experiment. My initial reaction was the same as yours: How can this be??? It was actually fun to imagine how it those seemingly unconnected this could connect.