IDE alumni win prize with DIY fridge energy saving

Improve the insulation of your fridge in four hours with some Styrofoam, strips of wood, double-sided tape and magnets. That is the idea behind the project hack your fridge by Industrial Design & Engineering (IDE) alumni Ludo de Goeje and Alex Klootwijk. Together they form the Rotterdam company Slijpstof – inventors for a better world. With their fridge idea, they were among the winners of Gideon’s Best Idea last year, a bottom-up movement for sustainability in construction.

An extra layer of Styrofoam improves the insulation of older refrigerators. Experimentally, they found that a fridge uses up to 15 per cent less energy as a result. In monetary terms, that saves 20 euros a year. Incidentally, on their website they list four other ways to make a fridge use less energy. De Goeje and Klootwijk were recently featured on RTV Rijnmond (from 08:45).

“A refrigerator is one of the few products where it is more environmentally friendly to buy a new product than to use the old one for longer,” De Goeje explains. “Of the ten million refrigerators in the Netherlands, three million are older than ten years. So, we waste a huge amount of energy and money with those. With simple insulation, we want to reduce the energy consumption of refrigerators and thus save energy and CO2. A new coat for your old fridge, in other words.”