What kind of fridge do you have that draws several hundred watts continuously? I haven’t tested my fridge, but I have a very large chest freezer that never draws more than ~35W. Surely a fridge can’t be 10x worse than that.
I seriously doubt that your freezer max draw is 35W. An Energy Star freezer can only average ~25W across the entire year. I doubt that the peak is less than 1.4x the average draw.
A fridge max power draw is usually during the defrost cycle. My defrost heater measures a bit over 500W.
You’re probably right, but I did watch my freezer plugged into a kill-a-watt for a while, and even when the compressor first kicked on, I never saw anything higher than 35W. Maybe the kill-a-watt is inaccurate, or maybe it doesn’t update fast enough, I’m not sure. Another factor, too: it doesn’t have any sort of auto defrost.
Different models and different designs and everything, but just as another data point, I recall my chest freezer pulling 300W+ when the compressor kicks on, and likely higher transient spikes, as it kept burning out the fuse on my 500W transformer, and I had to switch to a 1kW one.
