Energy saving in household refrigerators becomes more important as the usage of household refrigerators have been increasing every year. Since a compressor in the refrigerator consumes more than 80% of its total energy, it is necessary to reduce the energy consumption of the compressor. In this paper, the convective heat transfer coefficients on the compressor housing for both natural convection and forced convection were measured. Then, the effect of convective heat transfer coefficient on the power consumption of a refrigerator was investigated using a thermal management analysis. The results showed that convective heat transfer coefficient for forced convection is higher by 7.8 W/m²K compared to the natural convection. In addition, through the thermal management analysis, it was found that the increase in convective heat transfer coefficient reduces the refrigerator power by about 4.8% improving EER by 0.9%.