ReaperWithASniperFacepalm Moment
blahsayHe thought the light stayed on? They’re led anyway so no heat. Double the regards.
NumbersCanBeFunEven with an old school filament light bulb, this probably wouldn’t have been enough to “warm” anything inside the refrigerator even if the light didn’t turn off.
With the way bulbs are designed, all the heat is in the filament, and a bit gets transferred to the glass. The filament cools very quickly, hence it goes dark, and the glass is so thin that there isn’t a meaningful change in temperature of the surrounding air once it’s shut off.
Add that into the massive heat sink that is the contents of your fridge, not to mention the sheer volume of air that tiny amount of heat has to warm up… Anyone legitimately concerned about it heating the inside of the fridge needs some refresher courses in science.
The smaller the fridge, the more it’ll affect the inside, but it’s still negligible.
I have no data beyond anecdotal experience, so if someone wants to set up a scientific study, I’ll happily skim the abstract and make sweeping judgements about the content!
In a large fridge a small incandescent lightbulb won’t make much difference since it turns off when the door closes and would have a relatively small thermal mass, which I think is what you’re saying. That said I don’t think it’s accurate to say that “all of the heat is in the filament.” Heat spreads, and it will leave the light bulb. If you have ever touched an incandescent light bulb that is on you would have no doubts about this! Easy bake ovens used to use incandescent light bulbs to cook things, people leave their oven lights on to keep their oven warmer to let bread rise. Larger incandescent light bulbs can absolutely warm up a full sized room, 60W or 100W is a fair amount of heat. There are stories about extremely temperature controlled rooms where they would turn on a 100W bulb when a person leaves it because a person produces about 100W of heat.
Yeah, sure. The heat spread.
But when the filament is only heated for THE SECONDS THE FRIDGE IS OPEN, no, it doesn’t really have time to heat much.
Everyone keeps bringing up lights that are supposed to be on for hours, or literally never turn off.
We are discussing the few seconds a bulb is on in a fridge.