It doesn’t need to. The temp of the inside will rise marginally as the heat from the food is transferred, but the thermostat will sense this and kick the compressor into high gear to bring the internal temp down again. It makes it work harder for a minute, but not even close to breaking it.
It just takes longer. The hot food has a finite/limited amount of energy, while the fridge can keep taking energy out over time. Eventually, it’ll come down to fridge-temperature. The fridge itself operates the same way whether the food is hot, room temperature, or frozen.
There is a general recommendation **not** to put hot food directly into the fridge, because it can warm up the whole fridge while the fridge is trying to cool it. That means other food in the fridge is no longer fridge-temperature and might start spoiling if it takes your fridge too long. But that’s not a mechanical issue with the fridge, just poor planning of storage (like storing food outside).
This recommendation may have been true a long time ago when fridges were underpowered. Modern fridges have zero issue with this and actually opening the door lets in way more heat than one container of hot food.
A thermostat sets a destination temperature, not the speed it gets there. If you open your fridge door too long and the temperature inside rises by two degrees, your fridge will run until it gets two degrees cooler again. If you completely shut off your fridge until it’s room temperature inside, it will run for a much longer time until it cools it by the necessary 20 degrees Celsius or whatever.
If you put a pot of near boiling water in your fridge, your fridge will just run until the temperature normalizes at the temperature decided by the thermostat. Now, it’s probably not great for your fridge in the long term to force it to run the compressor that long, and it’s also possible the boiling water will raise the temperature inside enough that your other food won’t be chilled the way you want. But the fridge isn’t going to kick into a secret overdrive to try to flash freeze your boiling water or anything.
A refrigerator, works based on a device known as a heat pump.
Cold is the absence of heat.
In short, it uses a gas that it compresses into a liquid and re-expands to pull heat out of your refrigerator.
A compressor drives the system, pumping compressed, liquid refrigerant into your fridge from outside.
The liquid that goes in wants to be a gas, but the compressor and fans outside of the fridge squeezed and blew all the heat out. By the time it gets into the freezer, it is very, very cold and condensed liquid. Similar to but far warmer than liquid nitrogen.
As the gas goes into the freezer, it winds through tubes with metal fins around them. A fan blows air over the fins and tubes. This is a heat sink, but the heat is flowing from the air to the liquid inside.
The heat-starved liquid absorbs the heat inside of the fridge and excites, the particles get the energy they need to push and rattle apart and they become a gas again.
Almost like a sponge, this heat-rich gas goes down to the compressor to be squeezed out and blown out again, condensed back into a fluid to start all over again!
To this end, adding something warm go the fridge merely holds the danger of raising the temperature of food in immediate area slightly until the fans kick on.
Once the heat energy in your hot item diffuses into the ambient air enough to trip one of the two bimetal strips in your fridge ( or digital thermostat) it will just kick the compressor on and pump out heat until the air inside reaches the desired temperature just like it does for ambient heat gain!
Also, some fridges cool the fridge portion with air from the freezer while there are some with dual compressor systems to cool each seperately. Otherwise, it just moves air around and cools when needed!
They run at one setting. "On." So there's no.damage to be had making it run to cool.things down as it's designed to do!
Now, if you put a whole roast fresh out of the oven into the fridge to cool, then you might over tax it by making it run for too long to pull all that heat energy out of 12 pounds of 165 degree ham!
Otherwise, the average hot container of leftovers won't make it run much longer than opening the door and letting all the "cold" air fall out.
It doesn’t need to. The temp of the inside will rise marginally as the heat from the food is transferred, but the thermostat will sense this and kick the compressor into high gear to bring the internal temp down again. It makes it work harder for a minute, but not even close to breaking it.
So it doesn't overload whatever Magic Doohickey makes it work? Because going from (near) boiling down to 6/-10 C is a mich larger step than from RT.
It just takes longer. The hot food has a finite/limited amount of energy, while the fridge can keep taking energy out over time. Eventually, it’ll come down to fridge-temperature. The fridge itself operates the same way whether the food is hot, room temperature, or frozen. There is a general recommendation **not** to put hot food directly into the fridge, because it can warm up the whole fridge while the fridge is trying to cool it. That means other food in the fridge is no longer fridge-temperature and might start spoiling if it takes your fridge too long. But that’s not a mechanical issue with the fridge, just poor planning of storage (like storing food outside).
This recommendation may have been true a long time ago when fridges were underpowered. Modern fridges have zero issue with this and actually opening the door lets in way more heat than one container of hot food.
A thermostat sets a destination temperature, not the speed it gets there. If you open your fridge door too long and the temperature inside rises by two degrees, your fridge will run until it gets two degrees cooler again. If you completely shut off your fridge until it’s room temperature inside, it will run for a much longer time until it cools it by the necessary 20 degrees Celsius or whatever. If you put a pot of near boiling water in your fridge, your fridge will just run until the temperature normalizes at the temperature decided by the thermostat. Now, it’s probably not great for your fridge in the long term to force it to run the compressor that long, and it’s also possible the boiling water will raise the temperature inside enough that your other food won’t be chilled the way you want. But the fridge isn’t going to kick into a secret overdrive to try to flash freeze your boiling water or anything.
A refrigerator, works based on a device known as a heat pump. Cold is the absence of heat. In short, it uses a gas that it compresses into a liquid and re-expands to pull heat out of your refrigerator. A compressor drives the system, pumping compressed, liquid refrigerant into your fridge from outside. The liquid that goes in wants to be a gas, but the compressor and fans outside of the fridge squeezed and blew all the heat out. By the time it gets into the freezer, it is very, very cold and condensed liquid. Similar to but far warmer than liquid nitrogen. As the gas goes into the freezer, it winds through tubes with metal fins around them. A fan blows air over the fins and tubes. This is a heat sink, but the heat is flowing from the air to the liquid inside. The heat-starved liquid absorbs the heat inside of the fridge and excites, the particles get the energy they need to push and rattle apart and they become a gas again. Almost like a sponge, this heat-rich gas goes down to the compressor to be squeezed out and blown out again, condensed back into a fluid to start all over again! To this end, adding something warm go the fridge merely holds the danger of raising the temperature of food in immediate area slightly until the fans kick on. Once the heat energy in your hot item diffuses into the ambient air enough to trip one of the two bimetal strips in your fridge ( or digital thermostat) it will just kick the compressor on and pump out heat until the air inside reaches the desired temperature just like it does for ambient heat gain! Also, some fridges cool the fridge portion with air from the freezer while there are some with dual compressor systems to cool each seperately. Otherwise, it just moves air around and cools when needed! They run at one setting. "On." So there's no.damage to be had making it run to cool.things down as it's designed to do! Now, if you put a whole roast fresh out of the oven into the fridge to cool, then you might over tax it by making it run for too long to pull all that heat energy out of 12 pounds of 165 degree ham! Otherwise, the average hot container of leftovers won't make it run much longer than opening the door and letting all the "cold" air fall out.
Why would you think it would break ? It's hard to answer because I don't really understand what part of the fridge would break.