Domestic refrigerators comes in wide range of sizes and some times these fridges can be combined with freezers either stacked with fridge or freezer above, below, or side by side. Freezers may have drawers to store food in, or they may have no divisions. Fridges and freezers may be free standing, or built into a kitchen.
Following are the different types of fridges used for the household purpose:
- Absorption also called as thermoelectric Peltier units makes less noise and these coolers are used in the smaller fridges as they have no bulky mechanism.
- Compressor refrigerators are the most common type of refrigerators and they make a noticeable noise.
- Solar refrigerators are the another type of refrigerators which do not use any harmful refrigerants. They also reduce the consumption of the electricity. They use ammonia as working gas, employ large mirrors to concentrate sufficient sunlight to reach the temperature required to free gaseous ammonia from the solvent.
- Thermal refrigerators are designed to use electricity intermittently. These are insulated heavily and cooling load is limited primarily to heat introduced by new items to be refrigerated, and ambient air transfer when the unit is open.
- Compressor and Peltier refrigerators run on electricity, the difference between two types is the absence of refrigerant with the Peltier coolers.
- Magnetic refrigerators work on the magneto caloric effect and the cooling effect starts by placing a metal alloy in a magnetic field.
- Acoustic are the other type of refrigerators which uses resonant linear reciprocating motors and these motors generate a sound which is then converted to heat and cold using compressed helium gas. Finally heat is discarded and the cold is sent to the refrigerator.
These are the various types of fridges, which can be used in households, according to the need.