A Charlottetown couple has taken being green to a whole other level — they unplugged their refrigerator five months ago and haven't looked back.

Dona Francis and her fiancé Vihbu Athavaria have used their fridge as nothing more than an extra cupboard since January.

"You know, we were bundling up to go outside, but then we had this big machine running 24 hours a day to keep our food cold," Francis said Thursday. "So, I thought there must be a better way to keep it cold than using so much electricity."

During the winter, it wasn't too hard. The couple simply moved their food from the fridge to an unheated mudroom and their only concern was that the food might freeze.

"For milk and things, we did have to keep them in a cooler filled with water in order to insulate them against the cold, because we ended up with frozen milk and frozen yogurt. So, it's been a learning process," Francis said.

And through a little online research, they learned that even in warm weather, a fridge is not a necessity. They keep their eggs, fruits and vegetables on the counter and grow many of their own veggies.

They walk to the grocery store two or three times a week, Francis said, and plan to eat the food that can't be left out on the day they buy them.

Their dairy products stay cold in a clay pot with the help of a little water inside and out— a trick Athavaria learned growing up in India, where he said fridges aren't nearly as important.

"I moved here, and I was surprised to see the size of fridges in North America," he said.

Francis said the exercise has taught her that people can live without refrigerators.

"I think there's a lot of things that don't need nearly as much refrigeration as we're led to believe," she said. "I like to use eggs as a classic example. We leave them right on the counter, and they're good for at least a week."

In the process, Francis and Athavira have cut their landlord's power bill in half, but they say this is not about saving money — it's about saving the planet.

They've joined a growing list of bloggers who've unplugged their fridges and have started writing about it to get more people to do the same.

"It's not a big effort," Athavira said. "It's a mental block that we think it's too hard to live without these things. But if we try it, we learn that it's very possible."