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I have another thought regarding fridge efficiency.
During the summer your fridge is basically a space heater in an area you don't want heated and in many cases, use power to cool. This is horribly inefficient.
the solution is to figure out a way to vent that heat outside.
My fridge has its evaporator (or is it condensor, I always screw the two up) on its rear wall. My thought is to enclose this is an airtight box made of some sort of thin insulated board that you can buy for next to nothing at HD. Half inch thick or so should do. Use duct tape to hold the seams together and make it air tight. Place an input duct near the floor and an exhaust duct near the top. You could make these ducts out of the same material. Box out the sheet rock on an exterior wall so that when the fridge is pushed against the wall, it fits into these holes. On the outside wall, you would have to trim it out with some sort of ventilated cover.
I believe there would be sufficient airflow thanks to the natural chimney effect when the fridge is running.
During the summer, you'd get rid of that unwanted warm air. During the winter, you would be venting away wanted heat, but, the fridge itself should run quite a bit more efficiently due to the cold outside air running across the coils.
An even better solution for cold temps would be a figure out a way to pipe that cold air directly to the fridge. I actually like Pioslaw's solution of placing frozen water bottles inside. So simple it is brilliant. I will do this next winter.
Another thought I had was to figure out a way to plumb some sort of heat exchanger to use cold potable water on it's way to the water heater. There are a few potential problems such as what do you do when there is not enough hot water demand to carry away all that heat, but, there are solutions. Also, I am not sure how a fridge's coil would like being submerged in the heat transfer liquid, most likely water.
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