After we moved to Oregon in 1993, Stephanie started taking advantage of all the wonderful local farms in the summer. All sorts of berries by the flat, nuts, dried fruit, and local meat too. So we needed a big freezer. Someone sold us a 1970s upright, but it crapped out after just two years. Then I found this big old Crosley at a garage sale nearby for $25. I figured it was built for the long haul, and so I decided to improve its efficiency before putting it into service.
But its fan motor died last week, and I was afraid I might have to junk it. No worries on that account.
Powel Crosley is best known in automotive circles for his diminutive Crosley car, which was built from 1939 to 1951. (We have a superb article on the Crosley here). But Crosley was very active in a wide range of other businesses, including radio manufacture and broadcasting, sports team ownership, aircraft manufacturer, and appliances, along with a few others.
His first refrigeration appliance was this “Icyball”, which used the evaporative cycle (gas absorption) with no moving parts to create cold. Heat was applied at on end from a kerosene burner, and the liquid ammonia evaporated to create cold. A complete description of how it worked is here. Crosley sold several hundred thousand, mainly to rural Americans who mostly had no electricity yet.
In 1931 Crosley was the first to think of putting shelves in refrigerators, and called them “Shelvador”. I don’t know the exact vintage of our freezer, but I suspect it’s from the early post war era. Someone painted it that lovely shade of green along the way.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m something of an efficiency nut. I knew these old units were durable, but their insulation was weak. So I took it on myself to superinsulate it. I wrapped the sides and top with 2″ rigid foil-faced insulation, and sprayed some Good Stuff foam where it met the front. I also used it in the floor. I put the insulation on the inside of the door.
I put a KillAWatt portable meter on it for a few weeks a few years back to check its consumption and then compared it with new freezers. I was pleasantly surprised to see it used about the same amount of electricity as new units. Mission accomplished.
Unlike newer units, its condenser coils are in a compact unit, and therefore need a fan to force enough air through them. the fan sits directly behind the coils.
I noticed an odd sound the other day down in the garage. It was the the freezer running, but just the compressor, no fan. It was keeping the food frozen, undoubtedly due to it being cool in the garage this time of year. But I needed to either fix it or replace it.
I took the fan with me to my favorite appliance parts guy, thinking he might help me jury rig something up. Jury rig? He had a replacement motor in stock. I guess these are pretty common items for store-type refrigerators and such. $40 later, I was on my way home to replace it.
When I pulled out the cord that connects the fan to the compressor, I noticed it had been spliced before. When I pulled it out a bit more, there was another set of splices! This was going to be the fourth new motor, or one about every 25 years or so. Looks like I probably won’t have to do this job again.
It is amazing how durable fridges were from the 30s to the 50s, and how many of them still run fine with a little TLC.
If the nameplate is still visible, and it mentions Avco or the Aviation Corporation, this would indicate it was made after 1945, when Crosley sold his other industrial interests to concentrate on his small cars (and the Cincinnati Reds). As a practical matter, as you’ve already figured out, it almost has to be a postwar model, since such things weren’t made during the war. And there seem to have been very few made before the war, either.
Without doing research, it seems to me that in that period, manufactured items were more expensive to buy (relative to incomes) than they are today – due to production efficiencies and use of offshore labor. Items were repairable (and it was worth a technicians effort to learn those skills) because it was very expensive to replace.
Some people say the same about cars. Bosch will sell you a replacement D-Jetronic “brain” if you REALLY want one, but they’re essentially hand built, one at a time, when there is an order. And boy, will it cost you. Better be doing an open checkbook, 100-point restoration. But if you want a carburetor rebuild kit for dang near any carburetor ever made, it’s $30.
Appliances were drastically more expensive, in relative terms. But as you say, they were built to last.
Actually, many large appliances are still built in the US because shipping is expensive, and factories are so heavily automated. Well, Mexico, too.
Both Samsung and Hair have factories here in the US for just that reason. I’m guessing with all that added insulation you also don’t get a lot of frost build up.
When my parents moved to their house in McKeesport in 1956, they bought a new GE refrigerator with rotating shelves – great idea, with easy access and no corners for stuff to hide in, and a freezer on the bottom that needed frequent defrosting. It was still working 20 years later when we moved, and the people we gave it to were still using it 20 years after that.
Frozen foods really became popular after the war, helped by freezers like this. We also had a freezer xuest in the basement, big enough for a body.
Haier purchased GE’s appliance business.
Our 1976 General Motors upright refrigerator is still running like new. One thermostat was replaced in 1986.
I have a GM appliance too! This Frigidaire window a/c from, I think, the late ’50s or early ’60s.
Mom and Dad took their ’50’s chest freezer along to town with them when they retired in 1984, where it continued to whirrr away in the back room of the basement for another thirty years until we moved them into assisted living and it was sold. My three lovely sisters, who were in charge of downsizing, gave me the job of emptying it out and I found some amazing stuff, some of it gifted from relatives who were long gone. These old freezers run forever. I was told they were so inefficient that they were worth nothing, good to hear that the issue is primarily one of insulation.
Who knows, if you take as good care of yourself as my parents have, you may someday get to splice another motor into your Crosley!
Almost exactly a year after grandpa died, before I bought his house (which I now must sell, which is sad as all hell and damn near going to kill me), we went digging in grandma Belle’s DeepFreeze, just like this one. It contained a dismayingly large mountain of raspberries, strawberries, plums, beans, and other produce from the garden—dismaying because the newest was labelled “05”. Looked like there were bumper crops of raspberries in ’99, ’00, ’03, and ’04 especially, but they were all freezerburnt beyond redemption. Lots of chunks of salmon grandpa caught and froze in the early to mid 1990s. Numerous glass jars of sliced-up peaches and such. Zipper-lock bags of turkey stock from 1992, and whole frozen chickens purchased around that same year, DeepFroze, and never thawed or cooked. Found an unopened can of Swanson’s chicken broth, and an equally-unopened can of Nalley’s noodle-and-chicken dinner; those were probably put in the freezer sometime after random ideas started seeming sound to grandma.
Cranberries! Must’ve been a special on cranberries sometime in the previous decade; there were bags and bags of frozen fresh cranberries. The freezer was very full, and the only usable items were two smallish vacuum-packed chunks of smoked salmon. We should’ve done this years before; there’s no sense buying electricity to keep inedible antiques frozen.
Second prize of the archæological dig went to an ancient Postum jar with “5/78” written on the lid in magic marker. I was two years old when that went in the DeepFreeze; grandpa was just 65 and dad was newly 36. First prize: hidden in the last lower corner we excavated were more jars, one of which was labelled “10/75”. I was still gestating when it went into the DeepFreeze! Both contained an indeterminate grey goo, probably fish-related. Could really have been anything from stew to some kind of fish egg preparation to I-don’t-know-what. It reeked when dumped down the toilet, but the stink, too, was indeterminate.
By and by we replaced that freezer with a smaller one, indifferently made in the People’s Republic of Course. But across the laundry room from it still sits the house’s original 1949 Hotpoint refrigerator. It still runs silently and cools just fine, if I were to plug it in. It’s being used to store nifty vintage packaging collected from around the house, but now I guess it’ll have to be sold to someone who wants to restore it for a retro beer fridge or something.
Thanks for sharing your thoughtful and melancholy tale of discovery. There’s a metaphor in it, possibly the ephemerality of life, preparations for events that never happen, the future that arrives without you …
…donnnnnn’t haaaaaaannnng onnnnnn; nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.* It slips awayyyyyyy…and all your money won’t another minute buy-hiiiii!
DustGoo in thewinnnndfreezer, all we are isdustgoo in thewindfreezer!*We’re efficiently working on that
Somehow I think it was not just the fact that it had shelves. It looks like it had shelves that doubled as evaporator coils that made them novel.
Forgive me for being a nerd: that’s a freezer, not a refrigerator. I run into this distinction a lot at my job.
Honestly, I did not expect it to be this efficient even with super insulation. I also wonder how it apparently stays leak free for all this time.
Sealed refrigeration systems as found in refrigerators and freezers are a whole lot less leak-prone than automotive A/C systems and others that have gasketed-flange, compression-flare, and tube/o-ring hose connections and compressor shaft seals with high-pressure refrigerant on one side and open atmosphere on the other, along with enormous ambient temperature swings, constant mechanical shock and vibration, missiles relentlessly fired at the condenser, and other operational tribulations.
That evap-coils-are-shelves setup made fridges and freezers like this very strong in their food-cooling capabilities, but also necessitated extra care in defrosting. One couldn’t take a putty knife to the ice accretions and hammer away at ’em, for risk of puncturing the metal and letting out the refrigerant.
(as to fridge versus freezer: to a large degree, especially these older ones can be converted from one to the other simply by replacing the thermostat—or even just adjusting the existing one beyond its intended range by one means or another)
A really remarkable story is that of Frederick Jones, who invented the portable refrigeration system for trucks that made frozen foods and the modern supermarket possible. He was a self-taught engineer from Cincinnati who went on to co-found the Thermo King company, even re-designing the device so that it could be used to parachute fresh blood and plasma down to medics on the field during WWII. I like to pass this one on to my teachers during Black History Month so they can point out to our kids that they can do something else with their lives besides play in the NBA or design video games.
Mom learned about the dangers of defrosting those evaporative coil shelves when she got a little impatient and used a metal spatula while defrosting the refrigerator freezer. That proved an expensive, one-trial learning experience.
I knew I’d get a learning experience when I wrote this. Yes, the difference is minimal and simply a matter of the temperature setting which is almost always adjustable.
You are also right to point out the different design requirements and operating conditions of a stationary appliance versus automotive A/C.
Walk-in-fridge/freezers have another issue: The evaporator coil fittings are often soldered using silver containing solder. Meat products give off a acidic material (amino acids) that will attack the silver and cause it to leak eventually unless it is coated.
At work I place a freezer near a floor drain and take the water hose to the built up ice. In about 30 minutes that freezer is defrosted.
Here is another hint for fixing a refrigerator with freezer compartment that ices up. Often something is clogging the drain hose. After defrosting I remove the bottom panel in the freezer compartment to get access to the drain hole. I use a brake cable housing from a bicycle to push it into the drain line to clear the clog.
We still have the refrigerator we purchased for our first house in 1986. It has long since been relegated to the garage but it still runs and keeps food cold or frozen. I’m sure it is less efficient than a new unit but I’m also sure that it is better constructed. It is for sure constructed from heavier gauge steel than our “new” refrigerator which is a mere 10 or 12 years old. My in-laws were still using a refrigerator from the mid-fifties when my father in law sold the house in 2002.
If you ever have to move an old freezer or fridge, don’t tip it too far. Also, no matter how old or young: after moving a freezer/fridge to a new location let it sit unplugged for about 2 or 3 days. Any particles in the refrigerant can settle and thus stay out of the loop.
If a fridge or freezer is tipped more than about 15 degrees from its normal standing angle, 30 minutes’ wait time before plugging it in is more than enough—2 days is well beyond any potential safeguard benefit. It’s not particles in the refrigerant (if there are any, the unit will surely fail quickly no matter how long one waits before plugin); the wait time is to ensure against slugging the compressor with excessive oil in the cylinder.
Thanks for the correction.
Nice freezer and cool that they still make parts for it! I think that condenser coil setup fell out of favor because it takes up alot of space below the floor of the main cabinet, stealing space that could have been used for a lower shelf inside. Same thing with dishwashers – old ones had a service panel below the door that made for easy access to the mechanicals and plumbing, but stole space from the inside. New dishwashers (at least the more expensive ones) now have three racks in their “tall tub” with a door that opens down to the toekick. That 4″ high toekick area just above the floor is now your only access from the front, and in some brands that can’t be opened either.
My house still has the original 1952 fridge from the kitchen (since moved to the basement) which looks uncannily like your Crosley, in a similar color which also looks like it may be a repaint. I thought it was broken at first because it didn’t start up when I plugged it in. I tried leaving plugged in one day and eventually it started up and got cold. What I didn’t know was that some old refrigerators don’t have thermostats to control the temperature; rather the compressor just runs on a fixed timed cycle – on a few minutes, off several more. It happened to be on the off part of the cycle when I first plugged it in.
It’s a Hotpoint from 1952, meaning it was built right around the time Hotpoint CEO James Nance left the appliance world to try and save Packard. Incidentally, earlier in his career Nance had worked for Frigidaire, which means he did time at General Motors as well!
The fan must have been NOS, don´t you think?
I was thinking it was a generic part made by a supplier that was used by many manufacturers in their new refrigerators over a long period of time (fans haven’t changed all that much since the 1940s), and they’re still made now because they were so ubiquitous. If improvements are made over the years, often new parts are designed so they can also be retrofitted to replace older parts and be backward compatible.
We have a Maytag dryer from 1982, still going strong, replaced belt once. We have a Maytag HE washer from 2015. The dryer weighs twice as much.
My late MIL and FIL had a International Harvester chest freezer, bought in 1952, right after Ohio Edison electrified the area, that ran non stop, on an unheated back porch, until I unplugged it for good in 2015. While cleaning it out, I found frozen fruit in the very bottom, strawberries and blueberries from 1953! Now this thing was deep,, so they stored food in it and used it all the time, so the fruit must have been forgotten about. It was mushy but surprisingly still smelled good.
My uncle had an IH chest freezer. It had an IH emblem built into the side of the top that lit up to let you know that it was running. It died at about 40 years of age and he didn’t want to fix it. It was one heavy mother. My cousin and I had all we could do to move it out.
That IH stuff, just like Scots and Tractors, is built different. I had a Early Postwar GE fridge that ran well, and it was sure built well. But I also have a 1951 vintage I-H cream separator, and you’d need a chiropractor to move it across a concrete floor.. Things a damn anvil.
When I was a kid in the 1950’s an elderly neighbor had a Servel refrigerator, which was powered by natural gas. It had no moving parts and apparently used the Crosley Icyball principle of cooling.
Sometime in the 1950’s my grandparents bought a large Victor chest freezer. The problem was getting it into the basement of their home, which had a very narrow, winding stairway. No problem said my resourceful uncle. He removed a section of the floor on the first floor, fashioned a sling, and then with he help of a half dozen friends, lowered the freezer into the basement. The floor was then replaced and all was good. The Victor freezer was still cooling away in the late ’80’s when the house was sold. I wonder if the new owners ever thought about how in the hell that freezer ever got there.
My grandmother had one of those. Very silent, unlike the cricket who took up residence somewhere behind it.
I was pleasantly surprised to see it used about the same amount of electricity as new units. Mission accomplished.
Good deal. My 1982 Kenmore fridge was laboring a bit to start, like the bearings were about done, so I exploited Detroit Edison’s old fridge bounty and Lowe’s sale pricing to replace it a few years ago. Did not get as fancy as you did, just compared power bills for the fall, when A/C was not running and furnace ran little or none. The drop in power consumption gave me a payback on the new fridge of about 3 years.
In 1947 my parents bought a new Sears Coldspot chest freezer that went with them through various moves. 50 years later it was still going strong when Dad sold his last house (left the freezer in the garage for the new owner who wanted it!) and moved to a retirement community. Very different from the world of home appliances today.
we had a crosley stove- 4 burner electric range and double side by side ovens beneath- appliance. probably was purchased by my grandparents. late 40s. was still functional in the late 1980s. most memorable part was the burner elements were HUGE wide things. spirals that were nearly 3/4 inch across. one developed a hot spot. big scary lava producing thing. then the 2nd oven stopped reaching useful temps. was time to move to a modern size unit. still remember seeing the elements boink out when the thing slid off the truck onto the tipping floor. it was a quasi cartoon death scene, but also sad.
…we had a crosley stove- 4 burner electric range and double side by side ovens beneath
My mom had a mid 50s Crosley electric range. Had a couple interesting features: one of the burners was thermostatically controlled. Another burner could be shifted to the bottom of the several inches deep well under it. A special pot that came with the range then fit into the well above the burner for cooking stews and such. It wasn’t all bleeding edge technology tho. The fluorescent light above the controls didn’t have a starter, so you had to hold the start button down until it warmed up enough to stay on.
Reminds me of a landscape client I had. Ninety something years old, lived in her home for over 60 years, had been widowed over 30.
I had done her odd favors, and about 10 years back she asked me to empty and dispose of the upright freezer in her garage, she was trying to cut electric consumption. Still running. Still full. I don’t recall the brand, but it was an old one with a latch handle. First, I opened it. That required a crowbar. Once opened, I was met with a solid sheet of ice. Then to unplug it. I find the cord to be so frayed and rotted, I wouldn’t touch it. Rather than go looking for her fuse box, I used my fiberglass gaff to yank it out of the socket. One pop and flash later, the cord was snapped. I still had to get the plug out of the socket so I did have to find the fuse (not breaker) box. It then took nearly two hours of hammering and chiseling to unload the food. Steaks from a grocery chain that folded in the 80s was a real find. Then there were the cooked pork chops wrapped and dated…1968.. I finally got to the bottom to find mushy, and lukewarm, black-eyed peas. These were sitting directly over the motor. I hated to dispose of the unit, as I had no use for the freezer, but the neighbor insisted I remove the door before curbing it. I called a scrapper friend who said he got $15 just for the freezer in scrap weight. This same client also had two IH (International Harvester) refrigerators in the house. She said she bought them in 1954. She also said it was her understanding IH only made refrigerators for a couple of years.
Her house was a time capsule.
I had an old 1950s International Harvester refrigerator for a few years in the mid-’70s. It cost me $10 – hey, that wasn’t chicken feed to a poor college student! It worked fine for the time I had it. I had to let it go because it was too big and heavy to transport when I left college in early 1977, so I sold it for what I paid – $10. It looked like the one in this picture.
Since we’re on topic of fridges made by automotive companies, did you know that Fiat made them too?
They were initially built under licence from Westinghouse. They later started building their own compressors under the Aspera brand, which was sold to Whirlpool in the mid-80s.
Oh, hey, that’s interesting. Aspera was also the brand applied to Tecumseh small engines made under licence in Italy. Tecumseh’s other main product was refrigeration compressors; I wonder whether there was a relation here.
I still have my grandparent’s 1940s Kelvinator, that still cools, but needs a rewire due to a ground fault somewhere that gives you a nice tingle when you touch the handle.
Granny always called it “the icebox,” as that’s what it replaced.
I’ve got a Liebherr, working just fine. The same company also makes all kinds of stuff that doesn’t fit in your kitchen.
As a kid, I marveled at why there was a Ford emblem on the wood grain covered Philco air conditioner in my grandparents’ home in Japan. I thought to myself, doesn’t Ford make cars and why is there a Ford air conditioner in Japan???
Something about old appliances that make us all smile at little. After almost 80 years my 1939 GE Triple Thrift is still running like new and keeping my beer cold. Purchased new by my BF’s grandmother, his father kept it as the backup unit in the garage from 1967 to 2008 when he gave it to me. I replaced a few wires and found a used temp control to make it safe. A porcelain model, it purrs like a kitten. No evap fan though, just a low speed sulfur dioxide refrigerant compressor underneath. Nasty stuff if it leaks out. Same compressor as a Monitor top style fridge. I think they even made Monitor top models with this cabinet. Can’t be that bad on power consumption. The radio on top is a 1950’s Crosley.
When I was with the local gas company
( natural gas that is) the old timers would always talk about fridges with pilot lights. I thought they were just trying see if I was gullible enough to believe such nonsense. Didn’t take long find out they were tell the truth. A few absorption units were still around
They’re still available, as it seems, for a lot of money.
We had my grandmother’s old Norge upright freezer in our basement for about 10 years after she died. I was almost 9 and remember my dad and a couple of his friends using a 2 wheeler to slowly drop it down the steps. When we sold the house, we left it, and moved across the country. It had one of those latches that really locked the door, the ones that are removed to keep kids from suffocating in them. When the house was up for sale about 15 years ago, I went to the open house, just for grins. There it was, about 60 years old, humming away, the shelves were ice coated and it looked exactly the same as when we left. I wonder if it’s still there and still working?
In Israel we had Amcor which started by licence-building Philcos in the 50s. Amcor was a joint venture between AMPA (AMerican Palestine Automobile Co who was the local Brockway trucks agent), Haargaz (a bus body manufacturer) and businessman Steve Shalom. We had the proverbial Amcor 10 at mom & dad’s first house – it was noisy, small and inefficient but for a few good years it did the job until replaced by another, later model. It was then put in the garden, and used for storage with strict instructions NEVER to play hide & seek with it – a well known problem was you could not open the door from inside. The ramifications for small children are obvious. Later models did not have this feature.
Nowadays they are sought after by collectors of course but back then people could not wait to get rid of them.
The refrigerator in the first house owned by my best friends from graduate school was installed in 1913 and still in service in the early 1990s. Their house was a classic Craftsmen-style home in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of Cincinnati. The refrigerator was built-in, with wood and glass doors like you might find in an old bar. The compressor was in the basement with the original manufacturers tag advising you it needed to be oiled regularly. The stories of (relatively) ancient chest freezers also bring back memories and it seems others had similar experiences to ours when it came time to clean out their parents’/grandparents’ house.
My parent’s first house included a late 1930 GE fridge in the basement to complement the 50s Hotpoint upstairs. We used it for drinks and overflow and like it so much we took it with us when we moved in 75 and left it in the in 87, where it may still be running.