The garage fridge: what your second fridge or freezer really costs

The second fridge has a way of never appearing on any mental list of household costs - it hums in the utility room holding a few bottles and a bag of peas, and it has been doing it for twenty years. Run the actual numbers and it is often the most expensive appliance per hour of usefulness in the house: an old unit can draw two to three times what a modern efficient fridge does for the same job, every hour of every day, and it does that maths at your current rate - roughly 18-19 cents a kWh in the US, about 26p in the UK on the capped rate.

The decade maths

A 1990s fridge-freezer commonly draws several hundred watts-year in - say 800-1,400 kWh a year where a modern efficient unit does 200-350 kWh. At an average rate that is roughly the difference between twenty and a couple of hundred in annual running cost, depending on rates and the unit's age - plug your own figures into the electricity cost calculator and let the real numbers argue. A decade-old mid-range unit sits between those poles; a five-year-old efficient one is cheap enough to stop thinking about.

The garage factor

Fridges and freezers are rated for ambient temperature ranges, and an unheated garage or utility room in a cold winter can send an old fridge's thermostat into confusion (it "thinks" it is cold enough and runs oddly or not at all), while a hot summer garage makes the compressor run near-continuously. Cold-weather ratings matter most for fridges (freezers cope better in cool spaces); a garage fridge in a hot climate is the worst of both worlds - the 1990s unit in the Arizona garage is the poster child of this article.

The decision framework

Unplug it if it is mostly empty, pre-2010, and holding nothing you would miss - an empty fridge costs nearly as much as a full one, and the plug test costs nothing: unplug, note the meter difference over a week, and decide with evidence. Replace it if it genuinely earns its keep but is pre-2005 - one efficient replacement typically pays for itself in a few years of savings at average rates, the same arithmetic as the repair-or-replace framework. Keep it if it is modern, reasonably full, and doing a real job - and then maintain it: coils cleaned yearly, door seal tested with the banknote trick from the temperature guide, a hand's width of air behind it. And when a unit does retire, the failed-appliance dance is already covered in the fridge-not-cooling checklist.