 Hi, I'm Jeff from a Plants Wizard with another tip to help you save money and keep your major appliance lasting longer. Alright, today we want to focus on fridges and I go into about eight or ten homes a day and almost every fridge I see is wasting hydro for nothing and it's incredible the amount of people that don't realize how their fridge works so today we're going to explain that. What you're looking at here is called a cold control. Today we are going to learn where to find this control because this basically is your hydro build. This one device tells your fridge how long to run and how much money you're going to spend to keep your fridge cold. All it is is a basic switch, two wires attached right here, just a basic on-off switch and what tells it when to turn on enough is this simple probe. It's filled with a small amount of gas and according to temperature it will expand or contract and close or open the switch. What we want to do is figure out where this control is in the fridge so that we can keep it at the lowest possible setting still having proper fridge temperatures. Let's take a look at a fridge and I'll show you what I mean. The first thing we want to do is figure out if your fridge has one or two controls on it. I'm going to show you this old or fridge because it's one of the only ones that clearly displays the difference between the two knobs. This fridge is easy to find. There's only controls in the fridge section and you've got a control here and a control here. Now every fridge that has two controls, one of them is the cold control and one of them is an airflow door and this is probably the only fridge that I see that actually says air control which is a huge benefit. What you want to do is locate the knob or the switch which has an offsetting to it. Very important. So the one that actually has the setting that says off or zero with a line through it is your cold control. An airflow door will never have an offsetting to it. It's going to have a range from A to F or one to five or whatever the range is. It will not show an offsetting and you can flip it back and forth and feel that there's no actual click. There's no off on either side. Okay so if I turn this switch on, the fridge will start. As you saw before, it's got that little probe attached to it and behind here the probe sits in air which comes through from the freezer section, hits the probe and when the probe is satisfied with this temperature, it turns it off. Now the higher you number you have it, obviously the longer it's going to run. It's going to want to cool their temperature. 99% of fridges, if you put it at one third of the range of what the cold control is, it's going to run perfectly. There are some exceptions but they're very few. So if you go and look at your fridge and you locate the cold control and you see that it's at a number higher than one third of the range, reduce your temperature down to one third of the range. Go to your airflow knob. If you have one, some of them you're only going to find one switch and that is going to be very easy to determine that it's a cold control because if you only have one switch you only have one choice. That means the airflow is preset. The airflow means just simply a little door that opens or closes. All the way one way is closed, all the way the other way is wide open. You always want to take your airflow door and put it directly halfway open or closed. That's where you want to start. So go to your fridge, find the cold control. It's going to be the only one that has an offsetting and move your airflow halfway through halfway up. Okay, even though these are older fridges, I want to give you guys some examples of how to locate the cold control. Here's another fridge. Let's look inside. What do we got here? You see that there's two controls here. Nothing at all in the freezer section. So this is what we're dealing with. Two controls on this fridge. Which one's the cold control? Which one's the airflow door? Let's take a look. This goes from A to C. So we know halfway is B. This has got to be the airflow door. This one actually says off. That tells me that's the cold control. So when we, this isn't plugged in so I can turn it on. When we turn this on, we know that the range is five. Let's try, let's try around two. Now when you reduce or increase your temperature of a fridge, you're going to have to wait 24 hours before it actually gives you a reasonable temperature. And another thing to remember, fridges don't stay at a constant temperature. They cycle on and off. And once the fridge reaches its temperature, it'll cycle off. It's actually going to raise sometimes three or four degrees before it actually kicks back on to reduce that temperature again. So what you want to do is put it, like I said, a one third of the range, set your airflow in half and gauge your temperatures from there. But this is going to save you huge money. I'll show you what I see when I go on a lot of calls. This thing's way up. One of these is either completely off or completely open. And then you look at how long the fridge is running and it's like five times longer, literally, than it has to be. And your hydro build does not have to be that high. So forget about buying an energy efficient fridges, which is a load of crap. Just take your fridge and make it run properly. Reduce the cold control down to one third of the range, airflow door in the middle. And you will see that your fridge should still keep proper temperatures. You should be satisfied that all your food's still good. But you're not going to have a huge hydro build because you haven't wasted tons of compressor time running for absolutely no reason. All right. Now let's take a look at another fridge. This is a more modern fridge, bottom-mount freezer fridge on top. Let's check out the fridge section, see if we have any controls. Look around. Ah, there we go. We do have a control here. Let's see if it's a cold controller and airflow door. We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So I can see the range goes without any offsetting to it. This is an airflow door. So we saw one to seven. Let's put it between three and four. And leave it where it is. Now let's examine the freezer section. And by the way, a fridge will only get cold by cold air from the freezer, blowing up from the fan and coming out vents in your fridge. That's bottom-mount freezer or top-mount. It doesn't matter. Air from the freezer always blows into the fridge section to make it cold. There's no actual evaporator in your fridge or any unit that cools your fridge. It's just cold air blowing from the freezer up. So that's why this airflow door is extremely important. When I go on calls and I see some people have it completely maxed out one way or the other. Let's say this way, you shut off the airflow door to your fridge. There's going to be very little to no air coming up and making your fridge cold, which means it's going to run for a long time. So let's take a look at the freezer. Okay, so examining the freezer, we can see one control. Now we're going to turn it and you actually have the offsetting. That tells me that's the cold control. Once again, we want to go one-third the range. Two and a half is where I would start this one. So at two and a half and the airflow door and the fridge set right in the middle, that's once again an ideal spot to save your money and keep your temperatures perfect still. Give that a try. Now one really important thing I want to mention. When you turn, if you see this video and you go to your fridge and start fiddling with your cold control, it's a really important thing I got to explain. If you have your cold control on and your compressor in the back of the fridge is actually running, is actually on, and you turn your cold control down or to the offsetting and then crank it back up, you're going to do something called false starting your compressor. When your compressor is running and it stops running, it needs five to ten minutes to equalize the pressures before it's able to start again. If you turn it off and then turn it right back on, you're overloading the compressor is going to kick off the compressor and you have a chance of damaging it. So make sure if you turn it off and you hear the compressor turn off, wait five to ten minutes before you actually turn it back on to the proper setting. Very, very, very important. Now there's going to be many other videos with many other tips on how to save money on all your appliances including a lot more fridge videos, but one thing I just want to mention really quick. I see the switch on so many fridges and nobody has any idea what it is. Try humid, power saver, what could this possibly do? Well this one actually explains this, I love this older fridge because it actually explains what it does. When it's humid out and you flip this down to the humid setting, you are going to turn on heaters in the frame of your fridge called mullion heaters and the purpose is if you got sweating in the summertime on your fridge, lots of humidity in the air and it's sweat, you turn that on, the heater will come on, it'll get rid of all the sweating. Once the humidity drops September, October, turn this to the dry setting and that turns off those mullion heaters, saving you electricity, I see those mullion heaters on all year long and a lot of fridges and it's a total waste of power. And that's it. So let's conclude everything we saw today. Go to your fridge, find the cold control, the cold control is the one that actually has an offsetting to it, do not turn your fridge right back on, right away, give it five to ten minutes to equalize. We'll keep your airflow door setting if there is one and put it exactly halfway whatever your range is. So one third the range on the cold control, halfway on the airflow and wait 24 hours to see if you're still satisfied with the temperatures. If you are not satisfied with the temperatures, then you can increase the cold control one notch at a time but wait 24 hours before you do. But I've had experience on thousands and thousands and thousands of fridges and I'll guarantee you what I'm telling you is going to work for you and save you Hydro. Good luck.