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Cool It Again, Brother (Posted on 2022-08-22) Difficulty: 2 of 5
Alf and Arlo were in the kitchen, and Mother was out.

It was stifflingly hot, and Alf said, "It's too hot. I'm going to open the deepfreeze to cool us down a bit."
Arlo, his younger brother, said:"Yeah, good idea! But switch it off."
"There you are, Arlo," said Alf, "You admit that you were wrong when I opened the fridge door to cool us, and you said it would make us hotter."
Arlo replied, "No, I was right then, and I'm right now!"

Is Arlo right? Provide valid arguments for your answer.

See The Solution Submitted by K Sengupta    
Rating: 5.0000 (1 votes)

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Solution Solution (spoiler) Comment 2 of 2 |
An operating deepfreeze, like any other electrical appliance or light, brings energy into the house that, first, does its work, then dissipates as heat, as energy can be neither created nor destroyed, by the law of conservation of energy.

The deepfreeze mechanism works like an air conditioner, except it pumps heat from inside a box into the room in which it's located, as opposed to pumping it from inside the house to the outside world. I'm more familiar with the numbers for an air conditioner, so I'll use those, but the idea is the same. A 6,000 BTU/hr air conditioner typically might require 1,000 Watts of electricity to run. That 1,000 Watts, converted to Imperial units, is about 3400 BTU/hr and has to go some place. What happens is that while 6000 BTU/hr is extracted from the room, 9400 BTU/hr is sent to the outdoors.

If the deepfreeze door is opened, the built-up cooled air inside mixes with the warmer air outside the box (but still inside the house), to make the living space a bit cooler. But if the deepfreeze is left on, the mechanism will merely continue moving heat around in a continuous cycle while adding to that heat by the BTU/hr equivalent to its Wattage at about 3.4 BTU/hr for every Watt it uses.  Only that one-time shot of cold air is "free". It wasn't really free, but the room has already received the heat generated by cooling that air, but at least you can get some of that already-generated coolness.

  Posted by Charlie on 2022-08-22 08:00:50
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