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If you put a toaster in a freezer, which wins? (www.youtube.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/xkcd@lemmy.world
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[–] 42 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

The toaster…

Toasters can easily use an entire 120V-12.5A circuit, drawing ~1,500W. It can do this continually.

Freezers draw anywhere from 250-500W while running, and can move about double that in terms of heat energy out of the cavity. However freezers are not designed to run continually and instead operate on a duty cycle.

With both running continually the toaster will outlast the freezer

I haven’t watched the video btw.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    And not just that, but toasters heat things up a lot more than freezers cool them down.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    This kind of comparison always annoys me. Sure the coils are "hotter" but that has absolutely nothing to do with actual energy. Same thing when people bitch "oh my pc is so garbage it runs so hot" when it's some econobox 30w cpu- cool that just means your cooling system is bad or clogged. A machine can be producing 3kW of heat but be at 40C, or 3 watts at 150C.

    It doesn't matter that a freezer runs at - 20c and a toaster at 700c. If watts in = watts out it'll stay cold, and if it doesn't, the system will warm up.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago*

    The question in the video is not the one in the title. It asked "Would a toaster still work in a freezer?", and the chart was used to show that bread would still be toasted if it is in the freezer while toasting.

    So the other commenter equated two different analyses. This chart is useful in context of the question above.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Yea, people need to stop comparing temperatures and start comparing energy. My car produces ~125kW of waste heat at max load and stay at ~105C whereas my oven is limited to ~4kW and can reach 500C because it is insulated while my car has a massive cooling system.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    From what I've read (which was when I was seeing how feasible it is to run a fridge-freezer on a battery backup (Ecoflow, Jackery, Bluetti, etc), freezers (or at least fridge-freezers) don't continuously draw even 250W. Most of the time they draw a very small current. But when the compressor kicks in that current spikes right up.

    On that topic of running one off a battery backup, the conclusion I came to is that it's feasible as long as the battery has enough capacity to handle those spikes. So like a 1000W battery should be fine. But the battery will still drain quicker than you might think. Using a smaller chest freezer (preferably one that can be converted to/from a freezer and a fridge) is more efficient and will be more bang for your MWh.

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