In one embodiment, the present invention is a retrofit to rapidly transition to existing consumer refrigerator-freezer product lines in order to greatly eliminate wasted energy. This occurs because spurious opening of the system doors allows heat to enter with the deleterious side effect of causing the compressor to cycle on and off. This, in turn, consumes more power than if such duty cycles could be predicted, which would allow for their smoothing. The invention takes advantage of existing sensor technologies and develops a computational framework for their fusion for the prediction of a dependency, which controls operation of the compressor. Instances of a predictive schema are evolved and this approach allows for greater accuracy in less time than would be possible using competing neural network or support vector machine technologies. A novel evolutionary algorithm is included, which is so defined as to allow its execution on a lower-end computer.