> The chest-style refrigerator is surprisingly practical and convenient to use.
Except it's neither of those things and why the normal side opening fridge is the prevalent kind despite its poor power efficiency.
It occupies double the floor area for half the storage, and you have to take everything out to access the bottom most shelves. Even on boats where power efficiency is critical, I've seen people go for the side opening type if they possibly can, because it's just that much more practical.
But while you might be optimizing for convenience, this is optimizing for energy conservation. Seems like a great opportunity to be creative with an organization system.
I would bet that most people that are doing this conversion (and there are many, this idea has been around for years [0]) are already doing weird stuff for off-grid living, so turning a freezer into a fridge isn't a big deal - the inconveniences are just different.
The article does not mention that a thermostat coupled to a mechanical switch [1] is typically used to regulate the temperature.
Come on! You're on hacker news and this snark is the best you can come up with?
I challenge you to do better.
How about:
- shelves that raise vertically
- shelves that swing up and out to the sides or front (bet gas shocks could work for easily moving shelves)
- preplanning so that your meal ingredients for the week are on top
As with many things, you can change your surroundings or change your behavior.
Right?! I was thinking the same thing. Some kind of pull up gantry that lets you access everything. Or how about a vertical carousel? Like a paternoster on its side?
You can't slide a shelf unless there's space to slide; which is space that you can't then use for storage. Unless there's some kind of chest freezer I don't know about that has spring-loaded vertical sliding shelves or something.
Agreed. If there is room for N baskets on your rails you put N-1 baskets in each layer except the bottom where you can use N.
In practice you keep “the gap” over the part of the floor with the greatest cooling capacity and put your quick turnover “inserted warm” items on the bottom layer there. They cool fastest and are easy to get to.
Show me the creative system so you don't have to remove what's in at the front of a vertical fridge shelf to get to 2013 vintage jar of mayonnaise at the back.
If everything was on shelves that rose out of the fridge on open, you could conceivably get 3-sided/~270° access to items on all levels.
That's kinda what big door shelves are accomplishing in upright fridges, of course, and I have no idea how robust a riser mechanism would be over time, so I'm not sure how much better that is.
You might not quite be optimizing for energy conservation if you have to live in a big, fully detached house for stuff like this, and commute to the city.
I actually own one of these that run off a small solar panel and a battery. I've simply installed some "shelves" that I can pull up on rails to get access to the bottom. Dare I say, it's more convenient than my indoor stand-up as I don't need to rummage to get to the back (it also has pull out shelves, but not supported so everything would come sliding out if I pull to far or let it drop). When it's closed, the chest fridge functions as a table in my workshop.
The only issue is having to run outside in my tighty whities in the middle of the night if I run out of milk in the main fridge.
Also, if you're in an environment with tall ceilings, you could conceivable put wall shelves over top, or hang things above it (like from a cellar ceiling) to reclaim some of that space. Leaving enough room to access the fridge of course.
When I worked as a cook, in smaller restaurants we would have a walk-in fridge but a chest freezer or two (mostly fresh ingredients). Each freezer was just a bunch of milk crates with frozen product in them. You just shuffle the crates around. I realize milk crates aren't as freely available to the general public as they once were but the system works.
Milk crates are still widely available. Home Depot sells them for $10 each, and I've seen them for sale at grocery and hardware stores. The lookalikes sold at Home Depot are about 1/2" smaller than the actual ones (so not suitable for vinyl records), but I haven't measured the other ones, but they looked more like the actual crates.
Years ago the resized them so they don't fit LPs, or so the legend goes. When I was a kid, every grocery store had a mountain of these behind it and every audiophile had a wall of records in them. When you get dairy deliveries at a restaurant, in my experience no one is counting the crates that closely so we'd just borrow a few.
Think the wire utility shelving like you'd get in a garage or workshop but smaller (found it on Amazon), and I installed some drawer rails on the sides. The handle on the top is just some old wooden chair legs with some chain attached to the four corners of the shelving. Currently I just lift it out which is fine for me, but my partner struggles lifting and taking the stuff out simultaneously. I'm going to install a locking mechanism soon so it stays up at the top.
I can't find one right now but basically you push down and unlatch and then it has a spring that helps it raise, and to lower you just push down a bit harder.
That's even worse then - at least if the owner of a chest freezer forgets about something at the bottom layer, it's not going to become hazardous. With a fridge on the other hand, most things have a very finite lifespan before they become mouldy etc.
The main reason people forget stuff in the freezer is because it's used as a freezer, for long-term storage. The shape isn't the biggest part of that problem. If you use this as a fridge you won't have the same issues.
edit: having said that, the accumulation of condensed water at the bottom that some other commenters mentions seems like a real problem that needs a dedicated solution.
The full article (linked in a PDF) mentions that the author puts his stuff on cardboard boxes with rubber feet so it doesn't get soaked in condensed water, and removes the condensed water every 2-3 months with a sponge.
Haha, can you tell I'm trying to quit coffee this week? An entire article and half the comments in and I never noticed we're talking about a refrigerator and not a freezer. My bad!
Why are fridges not commonly built like drawer cabinets? Seems like a potential "best of both worlds" thing. Maybe too much space spent on the chassis?
The freezer drawer on the bottom style of combination fridge/freezers is actually significantly less efficient (10-25%, depending on the model) than the freezer on top style.
Can you explain why? I haven't been fridge shopping in about 15 years, which probably means that I will have to sooner or later. That style seems more convenient to me, but I also value efficiency.
It has to do with the arrangement of the compressor. The compressor generates a lot of heat, and is located at the bottom of the appliance. With a bottom freezer, that means the compressor is much closer to the freezer and it's much harder to keep that heat out of the freezer.
Maybe one day we’ll have a refrigerant network in a home that refrigeration could tap into, but the cost of specialization will probably exceed the savings :(
Or maybe run a municipal water loop into the fridge? Many are almost there when they have an ice machine (which is also horrible for efficiency).
Or in a cold one - it strikes me as some variation of insane that I have a box in my house that heats the room by trying to freeze the contents when it is -30º outside.
You fundamentally misunderstand your matryoshka doll of insulated boxes!
In winter, you don’t want to bring in very cold stuff from outside the big box into a smaller box inside the big box: the net effect is you’re making the overall big box colder.
Heat pumps are very efficient!
Though your argument holds up if electricity is expensive and heat is cheap (e.g. off grid with woodstove heat)
If anything, you want to bring stuff from outside the big box, put it in the little box to chill further (dumping the heat inside your big box), and then toss out the super chilled stuff from the little box out of the big box.
What I want to do is put the little box outside the big box in winter, though I suspect all the "waste heat" the freezer/fridge "burns up" offsets the gas used to heat the house somewhat.
All in all it's too complicated to work out, but I will admit to leaving frozen goods in the trunk in the winter because of laziness.
Becomes a problem when everything freezes in the warmer littler box inside the little box.
But nooooooooooooo, bring the warmish frozen stuff into the little box inside the big box in winter ASAP. (Unless, like I said, you're offgrid with unlimited trees)
Assuming the reference is to an upright fridge/freezer with the fridge compartment above the freezer compartment, one reason for less efficiency might be that the freezer has to contain a fan to push the cold air up to the top of the fridge compartment where it falls to the bottom of that compartment.
If the freezer compartment were above the fridge I'd assume it could mostly rely on gravity.
There is also sometimes a stepper-motor controlled baffle to open/close the link between the two - closed when the freezer is cooling - it usually opens around -18C when freezer temperature is heading lower.
That baffle will also close in frost-free freezers whilst the heater element is melting the ice on the evaporator - it usually reaches +20C and happens several times a week.
Combined fridge/freezer units use a heat pump to get the freezer really cold and residual cold air is cycled into the fridge. So having the freezer on bottom is not the optimal design, maybe because cold air is dense and will fall taking more active effort to distribute it.
Boaters are victims to fashion just like anyone else. Icebox style refrigeration is really the only option unless you spend a lot of time at dock or have a big generator.
For convenience items some boaters are using drawer refrigerators but unlike residential units, the drawers are like bowls keeping the cold air from falling out.
Not a physicist, but I would guess that the thermal mass of cold air is of little consequence. The thermal mass of all the items in the fridge would seem to dwarf that of the air.
Sure, you lose cold air when you open the fridge, but the warm air is almost instantly recooled after closing.
> Icebox style refrigeration is really the only option unless you spend a lot of time at dock or have a big generator.
Huh? I have a van with a side-opening "mini-fridge" (about half the height of a normal residential fridge) running on 12 VDC, and with 200 W of solar (shared between all the possible uses) the fridge will never run out of power.
I remember seeing someone who had created a fridge which was actually in the kitchen counter, pressing a button caused the shelves of the fridge to rise up from inside of the fridge ideally leaving most of the cold air inside the now empty fridge. It was interesting if nothing else.
This seems like something that good design can fix:
1. Make the top of chest-style refrigerators an integrated piece of a countertop. That way, when the door is closed, it essentially takes no additional space. That is, you are essentially swapping space: the vertical area that most kitchens reserve for a fridge can be used for cabinet storage, and the under-countertop area can now be used for cold food storage. Many kitchens have islands, and using that island for cold food storage would be ideal.
2. You could mechanize shelves so that they slide up vertically for easy access (think of a pez dispenser).
On a boat, if your refer is old enough, it has the old school kid-killing latches to keep it closed. (The refers are pretty small usually, so only fairly young children can be killed in them, and possibly not at all, if they're wearing their PFD as they should be and therefore will not fit.)
Newer ones will have a jerry-rigged hook-and-eye latch or some variation screwed inappropriately into the brightwork. Brand new ones will have nothing, and then they will have a jerry-rigged bungee cord wrapped awkwardly around it about 12 minutes after leaving the dock.
Sailors will be still on the pier arguing with the harbormaster, "what do you mean you stopped selling block ice?"
It might be “weird” that this link was submitted to HN, but the purpose of No Tech Magazine is to host things that Low Tech Magazine links to, to ensure the articles don’t suffer link rot.
There is a little value to the current link. I didn't know about No Tech Magazine, but now I do. It lead me to read several other interesting articles, which would not have been the case if I'd landed on the fridge article's original source.
> My chest fridge [...] consumes about 0.1 kWh a day. This fridge is 10 to 20 times more energy efficient than typical household fridges on the market today.
According to a test report by Stiftung Warentest (the German equivalent to Consumer Reports), my vertical fridge consumes ~ 0.4-0.5 kWh / day. While that is more, it's nowhere close to the 10x-20x given by this guy.
In the US (EnergyGuide) and Canada (EnerGuide) refrigerators are rated for expected energy consumption by the federal government. I've recently gone down the rabbit hole of new fridges (and am about to do so again) so this is all pretty fresh in my mind. In my case I was shopping for a fridge/freezer with about 19 cubic feet (or around 0.56 cubic meters) capacity – a rather average size, if a bit towards the small size in North America. The failed LG was rated at 387 kWh/year and its non-LG replacement was rated at 374–420 (depending on the specific build revision). So yeah about 10x tracks.
At its core a refrigerator is a big insulated box with a heat pump and a heater. Manufacturers have optimized the living daylights out of these things. Big manufacturers (LG, Whirlpool, GE) have tried at various points to roll out more and more efficient compressors going back to the 80s. And they've all had a horrible time of it. There's not as much room for optimization with the heater, but most manufacturers have moved towards electronically controlled heaters that can run on demand instead of on a timer – works well until a thermistor fails. Samsung also tried to "optimize" the defrost heater by shrinking it (my impression is LG is that just as guilty of this) and you'll find plenty of complaints about problems with the evaporators icing up.
Anyhow, out here, at least, smaller fridge/freezers including chest freezers are so-called manual defrost units and do not have a power hungry heater. If I had to guess I'd say the big difference consumption is due more towards running a giant heater in the back (a.k.a. auto defrost) than the overall size.
According to the government site responsible for energy ratings - energyrating.gov.au, ‘Refrigerators and freezers have been required to display an energy label since 1986 and to meet minimum energy efficiency levels since 1999. As a result, refrigerators and freezers are now 70 per cent more efficient than they were 30 years ago’.
New technology also mean that internal sensors inside the fridge can regulate the temperature so that the fridge is always running efficiently. Other innovations include temperature warnings and electronic temperature controls, humidity controlled compartments, and different temperature zones within the fridge according to the food to be stored. There are also ‘vacation’ settings which lowers energy consumption for the duration of your trip - you just need to remember to switch the setting off when you get home.
Today every new fridge carries a red-star energy-rating sticker, giving it an efficiency rating and telling you how many kilowatts (kW) of electricity it uses in a year, given average usage. While energy-efficient fridges might cost more they can save tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and hundreds of dollars over their lifetime through lower energy use. For instance, a 400 litre family fridge with a maximum six-star energy rating can use as little as 250 kW per year and cost you about $40 a year to run. A less efficient 500 litre model, on the other hand, could use 650kW a year and cost you more than $100 a year to run. That's a saving of $60 a year or $600 over ten years. And with electricity prices set to rise substantially in coming years, savings are likely to be even greater.
Most of that seems pretty standard to me. I don't know when some of that stuff got phased in, but humidity controlled compartments have been around for ages. The shift to electronic controls probably happened around 10–15 years ago.
Stateside the yellow "EnergyGuide" stickers were required by federal law beginning in 1980. These cover things like water heaters, fridges, dishwashers, and air conditioners.
FWIW my one fridge is around 538 liters (~19 cubic feet) and is rated at 420 kWh/year ($50/yr at $0.12/kWh). Of course I'm not sure how the testing methodology compares to that of Oz.
This made me think. I would kind of expect the energy consumption of a fridge to be related to the surface area of the cooled volume rather than the volume itself. It's not necessary to spend any energy cooling air that is already surrounded by equally cold air.
Assuming all fridges are cubes, doubling the volume of the fridge will increase the surface area by a factor of 2^{2/3} = 59%. This will also be true if the fridge has any rectangular dimensions and you double the volume by scaling it up evenly in all three dimensions.
Things are more complicated if you scale the dimensions of the fridge unevenly.
> Assuming all fridges are cubes, doubling the volume of the fridge will increase the surface area by a factor of 2^{2/3} = 59%.
You don’t have to assume any shape for this, as long as the shape remains the same, and that it is not fractal. You could have a spherical fridge and it would still be true.
> You don’t have to assume any shape for this, as long as the shape remains the same, and that it is not fractal. You could have a spherical fridge and it would still be true.
Why assume that the old fridge will be geometrically proportional to the new fridge? I think that's particularly unlikely to be true in the case of a person replacing their existing refrigerator.
> I would kind of expect the energy consumption of a fridge to be related to the surface area of the cooled volume rather than the volume itself.
I'd expect that for a fridge that's permanently closed, but what if you open it regularly? I'd expect a lot of the cold air inside (so volume) to mix with the room-temperature air once you open it..?
> Things are more complicated if you scale the dimensions of the fridge unevenly.
They are. Unless you reach the scale of the walk-in fridge, you don’t want a fridge to be deeper than an arm’s length, and even small fridges have that depth because they’re designed to fit a kitchen top, which also is scaled for an arm’s length.
Vertical scaling is a bit more flexible, but will stop at about 2 meters (until you reach sizes that you can drive a forklift in)
On the plus side, if you scale things evenly, wall thickness also goes up, so heat losses per m² of area will go down.
The energy consumption of a fridge depends on what it takes to cool the entire contents within a fridge, because heat from center of the food will travel to the surface when the surface cools down. Till the temperature of the entire food item matches the set temperature of the fridge, the fridge will be running. When you open the fridge, warm air enters the fridge, and the contents of the fridge gain heat.
Then there's variability depending on thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of various foods. So what you're trying to calculate is heavily dependent on the actual contents, not just surface area.
Of course, fridges have cycling behavior similar to an AC that turns on as soon as temp dips below a set temp, but has a window of sorts. Making the above math even more complicated.
> The energy consumption of a fridge depends on what it takes to cool the entire contents within a fridge, because heat from center of the food will travel to the surface when the surface cools down.
This assumes that the dominant energy expenditure of the fridge is bringing new food down to fridge temperature.
But almost all of the contents of a fridge have been in there for a while and are already at fridge temperature. Most of what the fridge is doing is maintaining the internal temperature against the outside environmental temperature.
Biggest factor for many people is that the fridge is wedged in an alcove with insufficient gaps for air flow, so it drowns in it's own waste heat and efficiency plummets.
Oh, that's a good point! Indeed, from what I can see American fridges are indeed larger. Mine has a volume of ~250 liters (of which 180L are fridge and 70L are freezer).
Those sizes exist in the US, often called compact refrigerators or apartment refrigerators. (although these days most apartments have the full size American-style fridges too)
These are becoming more popular in Europe, my mother for instance bought it, which I can't comprehend since she lives just with her husband. On top of that she bought also chest freezer for effin 2 people household. Meanwhile my family of 4 has no issues to use ~210cm regular Whirpool fridge with bottom freezer.
I don't like the idea of American fridges, they waste lot of space on the separator middle wall, I think the best compromise who is not fine with regular fridge are now a bit wider fridges but with single vertical door.
My Chinese in-laws have vertical fridge which has 3 sections, top regular door fridge, middle drawer which goes directly outside (not sure whether it's chilled or frozen), no need to open anything and bottom freezer with door.
> My Chinese in-laws have vertical fridge which has 3 sections, top regular door fridge, middle drawer which goes directly outside (not sure whether it's chilled or frozen), no need to open anything and bottom freezer with door.
We have these in the US.
We also have some with a door-on-a-door for the fridge portion, so you can grab e.g. a can of soda or some mustard out of the inset door which only accesses a little storage on the door itself, without opening the entire fridge.
Neither is as common as other styles (the latter especially—that's kind of a gimmicky expensive-fridge feature) but they exist.
American refrigerators have the freezer on top and the refrigerator section on the bottom. There are other configurations available, but freezer on top is the default and most efficient. Otherwise there are freezer bottom, freezer bottom with a drawer, side-by-side (this is probably the one you're referring to, and they don't seem to be very popular anymore in my experience), french door with freezer bottom, as well as custom shapes (counter depth, narrow, built-in, etc.). But a cheap basic fridge is always freezer top.
> American refrigerators have the freezer on top and the refrigerator section on the bottom.
This was probably true up until the 90s. At that point side by sides became pretty popular with the left side being a freezer and the right side being a fridge, full height. See:
After these broke the trend of the top freezer, other styles became more popular. These days one of the most popular style is the "french door" where there are two side by side doors for the fridge compartment up top with a drawer below for the freezer.
Top freezer fridges these days are often seen as a very outdated and out of fashion style of fridge usually only relegated to the bottom tier models of fridges. If you go into most appliance stores you'll see row after row of french door, several side by sides, and then a couple of super basic top freezers.
Personally, IDGAF about "style" for a fridge when it comes to door arrangements. I like my side by side the most as then I have both fridge and freezer items as convenient heights instead of only really having a freezer at eye level and having to duck down to grab anything in the fridge.
My North American in-laws live in a household of two and have three stand-alone freezers. Plus a kitchen refridgerator that's so big that you could call it a walk-in fridge.
Western Europeans are rapidly gaining on Americans but it's funny to see how much in denial they are about it even though it's impossible to miss when leaving the house.
That probably very much depends how often you open it. If you open the vertical fridge often then the difference might be larger. Vertical fridges in supermarkets are a crime IMHO.
Supermarket fridges benefit from having the compressors outside which can help tremendously depending on the climate.
A modern house conditions the air inside to a certain temperature (often heating it up) and then has a box inside that is conditioning the air (often cooling it back down to outside temperature).
It likely doesn't. We have a relatively small (European-sized) fridge that, according to EU energy label, should consume 183kWh a year or 0.5kWh a day. I was surprised when the real consumption I measured during normal use, set at 2.5°C, was almost twice that. Even never-opened measurement over a weekend showed slightly more, trough within measurement error.
2.5°C seems very cold for a fridge and is likely well below the standard that the EU energy label uses (for reference, FDA recommends 4°C). How warm do you keep the kitchen that it sits in?
The other factors will be how full it is, how frequently it's accessed, and whether it's got one of those ice makers.
If you have an empty fridge or freezer, it's a good practice to put e.g. water bottles in there for cool thermal mass, ideally in the top (cold air flows downwards; old fashion fridges were cabinets with a compartiment in the top for blocks of ice they would store underground in winter).
I assume that he measured the power consumption himself. You can find a lot of cheap devices that you can plug between your wall socket and the device. They are not usable for measurement at low power. If you try to measure something in the 0 - 1 W range, most just show 0, others even show something like 30 W.
I've heard that there are some fridges available now with variable-rate compressors that can run continuously, resulting in much lower noise levels without the noticeable cycling.
For a while we had piles of loose frozen things, which eventually got all mixed up, so we had no idea what was hiding in there.
Now I have some plastic crates stacked inside - but the bottom level is a mystery bc nobody’s ever wants to lift out a 20lb crate to see what lies beneath.
My wife did this with ours but took it a step further: the has a whiteboard in the kitchen with an inventory of exactly what we have in the chest freezer. It works well, except for once in a while when she takes something out but forgets to update the inventory. I offered to build her a barcode system but so far she hasn’t taken me up on it :p
I built a platform that lifts via linear actuators. When down it sits on bottom. When up, it comes near the opening. On top of it, is an adjustable metal rack similar to what you’d find in a commercial kitchen or sold at a big box hardware store. The rack almost fully fits the interior space when closed. When I open the freezer it can all lift up and I have perfect 360 access (although reaching through the front is easiest since it’s not too deep). We probably lose a lot of the cold air when we lift it but keep thermal mass high and only open it a couple times a month and organize in a way that we don’t have to lift the shelf most times (low frequency items on bottom).
Over kill probably, but my wife is short so it pays dividends.
We had a power cut while on holiday. No real damage or loss but the bottom layer is now re-frozen icecream, probably caused by something not quite sealed being stacked sideways.
We keep a cool whip container filled with water, with a quarter under the lid, on top of the water in the top of our freezer.
Then, when (not if) we lose power for a while, we duct tape the lid to the freezers closed. Once power comes back on, we check the quarter. It's a pretty good indicator of what we should get rid of, based on how far in the container the quarter has sunk and re-frozen.
Before buying my chest freezer I did some investigation about organization approaches. I found several articles and one that caught my attention was about using ikea recycling bins ( HÅLLBAR 3 and 6 gallon - search for 204.202.03 and 803.980.58) with handles that have the perfect size and weight distribution to be stacked into a 7.2cu chest freezer. The plastic material also seems to hold very well to the cold. Here's a video of someone following the same approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydbsVS5rbSM
Having used some in commercial environments they typically use horizontally sliding trays and leave an empty space on each layer to reach under. Apparently systems that pulls out vertically also exist but I have never seen one.
I covered the bottom of mine with ice blocks. (I filled empty milk cartons with ice.) Very useful to put in a cooler; and even more useful to give out to friends during power outages.
The ice blocks push all the food up to the top of the chest freezer, and it helps remind us not to overfill it.
Sounds like you need some sort of inventory system. Maybe number everything, or add a barcode. We're been considering a box freezer so this is something to keep in mind for us.
Why replace one chore with another. My solution was a height adjustable platform, so I can easily lift/lower the entire contents with a push of a button.
The only thing worse than vertical fridges are those supermarket fridges that are both vertical and doorless. Those should be banned and IIRC in some countries supermarkets must have fridges with doors (I think France is one of those).
Oddly enough, I saw quite a few of the doorless variety while on vacation in Hawaii. It seemed like every supermarket had at least one bank of doorless fridges. They run 24/7 on an island with 100% humidity and crazy high energy costs.
Only the really small units for mom-and-pop stores do it, the supermarket-sized ones have the compressors and condensers outside the building.
I know because a brother-in-law's company sells them.
Fridges in stores typically have the condensor coils (the bit that gets hot) placed outdoors. That's why they're expensive to install and can't be moved around by the store staff.
If home refrigerators did the same, it would reduce your electric bill quite a lot, especially in places where A/C is used.
Sounds like an interesting idea for reducing energy consumption. Homes already have air ducts for washers/driers. Why can't be something for fridges too? Home fridges are almost never moved anyway.
Such legislative knee-jerkery is counterproductive and unnecessary.
Whether having the heat rejecting coils indoors or outdoors is most energy efficient depends on the local climate. It is a very straightforward calculation based on building heating and cooling requirements over a given year and doing such calculation (really more of consulting a table of pre-crunched numbers) is SOP in commercial refrigeration.
I assure you nobody with a commercial refrigeration need is pissing away thousands of dollars a year in energy by choosing the non-optimal equipment for their situation. Basically there is already a big "tax" on "doing it wrong".
I wonder if anyone ever has two sets of coils (inside and outside) that they switch between seasonally? I'm thinking of places like northern Canada, where -40 is a common outside temperature for weeks at a time during winter, but 30 is common during summer (or even 40 in extreme cases). I imagine running costs dwarf the actual upfront cost of these units, but I don't know for sure.
The UK has those too, including entire open sections of milk jugs where the delivery cart-shelf is parked into.
Though some supermarkets in the UK seem to have a simple "solution" to this problem: turn the AC inside the building to a maximum. Last summer, it was 32°C outside, and a chilling 15°C inside.
Doorless fridges aren't a problem if you consider the whole shop as the fridge. /s
One of my pet peeves is that, even where there are doors on these supermarket fridges, I've found that it's common for staff to lock them in the open position to streamline shelf stacking (presumably), then fail to unlock them.
I'm so irritated by this phenomenon I'll unlock those doors to close them.
Honestly never seen this in the supermarkets I frequent. The slidey glass panels on top of the actual chest freezers on the other hand.. feels like every time I visit some customer left one open, but I've seen shops have automatically closing ones which is very fun if you have a hand full and want to fetch something with just one hand.. or god forbid you're not very tall.
French here, many supermarkets have vertical, doorless fridges. So if they are banned, either these supermarkets are breaking the law, or it is not yet effective.
I am talking about fridges for milk, cheese, etc... that are round 5C. I don't remember seeing vertical, doorless sub-zero freezers. In fact nowadays, even the horizontal freezers usually have doors.
I don't think this is mandatory but government have been lobbying with supermarkets and they agreed to add doors about 8 years ago, probably to avoid being forced with a total ban.
You still see some small doorless fridges with high margin quick grab products but you no longer need to wear a coat when you go near the fresh or frozen department.
Part of this is not energy savings, but food safety - doorless fridges often have some products near the front that aren't kept to the required sub-5C. Meat products often require 0-3C nowadays too, which is an even narrower range and even harder to meet across all products in a doorless fridge.
Lower and more precise temperatures reduces food waste, which indirectly reduces both costs and energy use.
Over here in Germany I am seeing those fridges getting doors when supermarkets are being renovated as well. But still many open ones exist.
(While I assume that some of those are opened quite often, where shutting doors might push a lot of warm air back in, while keeping them open with less air movement might even be more efficient)
UHT is a bit cheaper and of course, shelf stable. I understand the reason why it is so popular.
Personally, I use both. I usually buy a bottle or two of fresh milk when I go shopping, and I keep a pack of UHT in case I don't have enough fresh milk. This way, I will not run out of milk, and I will not let my fresh milk spoil because I bought too much.
And yes, fresh milk (whole and half-skimmed) can be found in almost any supermarket. AFAIK skimmed milk is almost exclusively UHT, and raw milk is very hard to find but not illegal.
They're very common here in Europe. Although when shops get remodeled they usually are replaced with newer models that have doors (and now doors that close themselves, because people). Seems the energy costs have risen sufficiently to make them care.
We used to have those in the Netherlands before there was any attention paid to energy savings (~15 years ago). Freezers also used to be just open without any coverings. Budget supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi were the first to introduce both sliding glass doors on the freezers and doors on the standing fridges.
All the meat and dairy, and some vegetables are in completely open refrigerators in most Australian supermarkets, although they’re also air conditioned so any loss of cold air is just more air conditioning really
We made such chest fridge from an old freezer, and have been using it for almost a year now. The floor space it takes isn't that concerning, as it doubles as a counter top. It really is very efficient.
The only problem we have is humidity. With everyday use, a lot of condensed water gets stuck inside, the humidity goes near 100 % and the moulds really like that.
We tried many things, including making a drain hole inside, but nothing helped. We "solved" it with putting 1 kg of adsorbent (silica gel) on the bottom. It lasts about two months between regenerations, so it is quite usable this way.
With a regular fridge/freezer the steady-state relative humidity should be quite low because the cooling coils will condense out a lot of the water vapour, and drain it out a hole in the back to evaporate outside the enclosure. The cooling coil is always going to be the coldest surface within the enclosure, therefore that's where the water vapour would tend to condense.
Don't chest fridges have a similar mechanism? Perhaps the problem is things being too closely-packed, so the air can't circulate - so that when the lid is opened and water vapour let in from outside, it condenses on the food etc - but this isn't then removed by the mechanism above.
The cooling in this freezer is all around the walls, and the condensed water stays on the walls and then falls down on the bottom. There was originally no drain hole, and even adding the drain hole didn't solve the problem.
It was designed as a freezer, not a fridge, after all.
> We tried many things, including making a drain hole inside, but nothing helped. We "solved" it with putting 1 kg of adsorbent (silica gel) on the bottom. It lasts about two months between regenerations, so it is quite usable this way.
Now THIS is a great idea! I have the same thing (converted old freezer to chest fridge with custom IoT temperature-controlled plug switch magic; though I now replaced it with a chest freezer that was actually designed with a thermostat allowing temperatures over 0 degrees celsius) and the same exact problem with the moisture accumulating at the bottom. The device actually has a hole to let the water out, but that's not helping as there must be a huge puddle of water before it even starts reaching the drain in one of the edges of the machine.
I might try that adsorbent trick, though I would imagine that I'd have to add some kind of grating on top of the adsorbent? Because I'd rather not want to place my water bottles into the adsorbent and have it stick to the bottom of the bottles.
I've had the wick routed along the outer side of the fridge for a few days now and it managed to remove every last bit of water (when I placed it there were puddles of water all around the fridge) and successfully keeps the fridge dry now. The water evaporates from a piece of cloth attached to the ends of the wick as planned, so the entire system is maintenance-free now. During the first days the cloth piece was totally soaked, but now that the initial puddles were removed it is relatively dry and I could just place it under the bottom of the machine, so it is practically invisible.
Nice idea, thanks! I've just ordered a few meters of wick and will try exactly this. The puddle actually isn't a puddle; it's more that the condensed water drips down the four sides of the interior walls and collects at the bottom where the walls hit the floor. I should thus be able to run the wick around the bottom of the freezer in the edge to collect most of the water.
The drain hole is in the bottom, so I can run the wick through it and out of the machine. I hope to simply be able to attach a shred of cloth or something to the end of the wick in order to evaporate the water away to the outside air. That would make a nice, maintenance-free solution.
I use colored indicator silica beads for desiccant purposes and when the indicator shows they're "wet"/green, I spread them evenly on a baking sheet with foil and bake them at the recommended temp, stirring occasionally, until they turn back orange.
We bake it on low temperature for like two hours. We did it just once, so we cannot assess whether it's still efficient with the baking energy included.
But the winter is coming now, so the extra heat generated when regenerating won't go to waste.
I wonder how effective a 1kg $1 box of salt would work. I guess it would have to be dumped into a Teflon mailing bag to breathe better than the box it comes in.
Then toss it every few months. Mold won’t grow on the salt itself, so could cook with it.
Or use it as driveway deicer.
Or just but the 10kg bags of rock salt in winter for driveway deicer for like $5.
This has never bothered me until moving on a boat, where top-loading fridges (often ice boxes with a compressor kit retrofitted) are the norm. Because energy supply is very limited. They are integrated into the kitchen work surface and double as a temporary workspace when closed.
So it's possible to save space _and_ energy.
Now the standup kitchen fridges in houses really bother me. Every time I see someone open one, I imagine seeing all that cold air being sucked out by the opening door and falling on the ground.
> I imagine seeing all that cold air being sucked out by the opening door and falling on the ground.
Air has negligible thermal mass compared to everything else solid or liquid in the fridge. As long as you don't leave the door open long enough that fridge contents themselves start warming up, the energy losses are minimal.
Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:
My fridge is around 1.0 x 0.5 x 0.5 m, giving a volume of 0.25 m3.
Outside temp is around 25 C, inside the fridge is around 5 C.
Air specific heat capacity is around 1000 J/m3/K.
If the fridge only contains air (it does not), and all air gets cycled out when I open the door (it does not), the fridge needs to pump out 5 kJ of heat after each door opening.
I don't know what's the typical efficiency, but let's say the fridge pumps out as much heat as you put electrical work into it (COP=2).
That's around 0.0014 kWh wasted per door opening.
It's nothing compared to just steady state consumption of a closed fridge.
Typically your house air will have a dew point above 5C. That means, when it enters your fridge, dew will condense on the inside. The latent heat of condensation is really high. Just 10 grams of water could be 22 kilojoules of energy released.
That water will eventually end up as ice on the evaporator (since the evaporator coil in a fridge-freezer typically has to run sub-freezing because it is shared with the freezer). Thats more energy loss (3 kJ for our 10 grams).
Then the defrost mechanism will kick in to melt it into the drain - which is a resistive heater normally. So 3kJ again. The resistive heater typically heats far more than it needs though - a bunch of heat will be wasted into the metal of the coil and air in the fridge - which in turn will need more refrigeration to correct.
So all in all, the energy loss of opening the door of the fridge is dominated by the water you're letting into the fridge, not the energy loss of the cold air.
This analysis is tricky enough and with enough variables (house humidity, design of fridge, amount of other 'wet' food in the fridge, etc.) that I haven't seen anyone attempt to come up with a cost number, either numerically or experimentally.
I agree with the humidity argument, although even if you 10x the energy loss opening the fridge is still relatively small contribution to total energy use unless you open your fridge tens of times per day. It's nowhere close to what the article claims.
The defrost thing I guess depends on the fridge. Mine has two coils and the one in the 5 C non-freezer section generally stays above the freezing point when the compressor is not running. It does does not have a resistive heater.
10g of water condensation isn't extreme. It's about typical for moderate temperatures, like the 25°C of the OP's example. On the tropics you will have much more than that.
But 10g of water freezing is extreme. There are mechanisms on the fridge to avoid the water freezing.
Think of an ice cold beer sitting out. Quite quickly it gets covered in dew.
But the inside of your fridge and all the goods inside has the surface area of hundreds of ice cold beers.
It isn't just a matter of how much room air you trapped in the fridge, but how much passes the beers in the fridge while you have the door open - perhaps 10x as much.
I also made the same quick calculation, opening the door ~20-30 times is equivalent to placing a bottle of milk in it, in terms of joules. (Milk has ~4x the mass, and ~6x the heat capacity in terms of mass.) Is that negligible? Well, depends on the usage, i guess, but the 10x efficiency from the article certainly can't come from it.
Maybe if you open the door, the moving air heats the things inside much faster?
edit: in a sister thread they state that the humidity of air plays a more significant role.
I've only ever had standup fridges, but long ago I had a free-standing one, whereas the past decades it's been integrated fridges, and I notice those integrated fridges are just terrible; way more ice accumulation in the freezer section, and the fridge running more and more loudly. And this is a top brand, A+ energy rated fridge. I suspect that because of the way they're integrated into the kitchen, they have a much harder time getting rid of their heat. And maybe the door doesn't close quite as reliably?
I suspect the big problem with chest freezers/fridges for most homes is their shape. People want a flat counter on everything that they can leave stuff on, while still being able to access the fridge, so a fridge opening from the top isn't going to fit anywhere. But I've been thinking: how about a chest fridge that slides out? That way it can disappear underneath cupboards or counters, while you can still access them without having to clean up your counter top.
I have a chest freezer converted to a fridge. If I had the skills (I don't), I would make the lid so that it can rise vertically at the push of a button. That is, hydraulics, at the push of a button the door would lift vertically and all the shelves (I would have built if skilled and the shelves would be grates so as not to trap cold air and bring it up out of the box) would rise with it. The top of the lid could be a work surface when closed.
There is the issue of cleanup and condensation. That is something would would need to be solved or at least be made easy to clean.
What irritates me (also friends) is relatives opening it and standing their thinking about the food, keeping it open for a minute or more without actual activity.
I wonder if transparent door would be a gain here, with worse thermal insulation but allowing to locate things and contemplate before opening the door and allowing the cold to escape to the floor.
Does it make much of a difference if you keep it open for 20 seconds or 2 minutes?
I imagine that as soon as most of the cool air has flowed out of it (which should happen quite quickly), the additional energy loss is minimal
There are compromise versions where there is a small door at half height in the big door, through which you can get the bottles/milk crates out of the side of the door.
What I am wondering is if there is a way to solve this with at technical solution that keeps the current standup design but makes it energy efficient.
For example:
An opening at the bottom of the door that sucks cold air in when the door opens and transports it to the top back of the compartment.
While open, most of the cold air would be saved and it's only a ventilator that's running for a few seconds
Perhaps a transparent door, inside the main insulating door. So people could open the fridge and stare slack jawed without letting all the cold out. Condensation blocking the view would be an issue I suppose.
Many fridges start beeping after 30 seconds of the door being open.
People quickly learn to ignore the beep while they "quickly make breakfast" and then put the sausages and eggs back in the fridge and close the door after eating breakfast. #billpayerfrustratedwithhisfamily
I have a large American-style fridge/freezer. I measured the power consumption, and it came out as an average of 70W, or 1.68kWh/day. For the size of fridge, this isn't bad. However, I was slightly surprised to see that this was more than our use of electricity for all cooking activities - that is, oven, kettle, microwave, slow cooker, toaster. I have a gas hob - if this were not the case, I suppose it would be the other way around.
But still, that one fridge was a very significant portion of the total house electricity use.
I have a separate freezer/fridge and they amount to about the same as a standard European sized fridge (so no double door US style things) and the freezer uses about 63W when on and the fridge about 58W. I guess the compressors are of the same order but the freezer simply runs longer. Daily usage is about 0.9-0.92kWh. Less if you don't open them, more if you put something in the freezer/fridge which is not cold.
I tried measuring if getting a new one would save power and was affordable somewhat cost effective but the short story is that the upfront cost could only be recuperated even by a tiny bit when kWh prices rise far into the 1 Euro/kWh.
Another related concept - have a chest freezer and cycle through frozen 2 or 3 litre soft drink bottles full of glycol that you put in a small/med well insulated cooler you use as a "day fridge".
Most people keep way more than they should or need in a fridge, and often best to go straight to freezer to avoid wastage if you are not right on to eating leftovers.
So this does not save energy because you don't run a fridge, you use extra in the freezer for the glycol bottles bthan if you just used it as a freezer, but your fridge is now small with a top lid instead of front doors, and you can heavily insulate a cooler very easily to make it super efficient.
What's the equivalent energy cost of a new fridge though? And it's not just that, there's the pollution of dumping the old one (how much refrigerant will be leaked? how much plastic sent to landfill?). And there's costs of the new one that aren't factored in, like transporting it halfway around the World.
I wish government put money into guidance on these matters for domestic goods.
Mine is ~8 years old Samsung with i don't know which energy efficiency class: 1,1-1,3kWh/24h
Vertical freezer with some 7 chests which is many more years older takes 0,6-1kWh/24h - probably depends when we open it and when not.
Probably better to look at monthly (October) stats: 38,64kWh Fridge, 21,81kWh for freezer.
Hmm, August 40/35; July 27/24. Dunno why it fluctuates so much. Ofcourse, October was heating season, but that doesn't seem to impact freezer for worse. Which is weird - it is 2 meters apart from heat source. But yeah, summer could hahve
I had an old fridge, I thought I'd keep it in the garage and keep some beer in it for when people came over. Finally got rid of it recently - going by my electricity bill it was costing me nearly a $100 a quarter to keep a carton of beer cold :-D.
That's pretty high though. I've measured my brand new chest fridge (which I operate as a cooler, thus only set to 5 degrees celsius) recently and it consumes 0.2kWh/d. My old vertical fridge/freezer combo which is over 10 years old consumes 0.72kWh/d (that one is operated normally). Both are opened multiple times per day.
Or to change it. In Europe at least 0.20-0.40€ per kWh is not that strange, so you can be wasting ~150€/year just by using a 2kWh/day fridge versus a 1kWh/day.
Which is the typical wattage of an average fridge compressor.
This means the OP's parents' fridge is probably running 100% of the time and doesn't manage to transport the heat outside anymore faster than it is re-entering. Basically it's broken.
> But it typically lasts 10 before it needs repairs (neighbors replaced the compressor).
Typically it's way more than 10 for fridges and freezers.
I just recently replaced a chest freezer that was 24 years old. It was still working, but started to consume excessive amounts of power because it apparently lost the ability to efficiently transport heat - it just managed to cool a very small area of the surface inside, even though constructively it should cool over almost all the surface area. As a result the compressor ran almost constantly to keep the insides cool.
The OPs' parents freezer probably has the same problem.
No, because the heat-pump (compressor) in the back needs to stand upright. Also the back has cooling fins that need air circulation
FYI: After transport you need to wait some time to let the oil in the compressor settle before turning it on. A level ground is also highly recommended.
Check the datasheet for the fridge compressor. Some models are designed to run in two orientations. If you're very lucky, the other orientation for your compressor will be 'on its back'.
If you run the compressor in an orientation it isn't designed for, the motor will get 'liquid slugging', which is unrecoverable - you'll need to buy a new fridge.
By the way, if liquid slugging is caught before the motor burns out (some motors have an overload disconnect), then you can normally switch around the start capacitor onto the run wiring and vice versa to run the motor backwards. Running it backwards for a second can release the liquid and 'fix' the fridge.
You'd have to sweat together new copper fittings though and probably deal with draining + recharging the refrigerant lines. Not a trivial project for a novice.
And if you accidentally just vent the refrigerant lines instead of draining then you can release a year's worth of global warming in about 20 seconds. Best not to try.
Not op, but I think it means that the cooling system contains a gas that if released (it would normally not be released at all), it would do the same amount of harm to the environment as you would normally do in a year.
(I have no idea if this comparison is accurate, but I do know that coolers commonly contain gasses that you don't want to release)
Unlike automotive (mobile) air conditioning, the kind of refrigerators you'll find in a kitchen rarely leak as they're designed with no fittings or perishable/permeable hoses to leak. To do any sort of service you open up the sealed system which creates the possibility for deliberate or accidental leaks.
But…
At least in the US kitchen refrigerators have moved to hydrocarbon refrigerants (R600a a.k.a. isobutane) which have a much lower global warming potential of around 3.3x that of CO2. Prior to that it was R134a, and I'm pretty sure R410a was mostly limited to HVAC applications. More to the point a modern refrigerator has on the order of a couple ounces (so maybe 50 grams) of refrigerant not an entire kilo.
Don't fuck around with the sealed system unless you've the proper training. It's not rocket science but there are any number of non-obvious ways for things to go wrong. R600a is (in)flammable, R134a decomposes into hydrogen fluoride when exposed to flame, and R410a is a blend of things so you can't really top it off.
Edit: Copper fittings if you're lucky. We're starting to see some bits made out of aluminum now so (assuming you want to do the job correctly) you'll either have to get real good at brazing aluminum to copper or you'll have to invest the $$$ in the crimp tools.
Refrigerants typically have a greenhouse effect that is thousands of times more potent than CO2.
For example, the refrigerant R-410A does about 2000 more greenhouse warming over a 100 year period. So a leak of 1 kg of R-410A is equivalent to about 2 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
10 years ago I bought an expensive tumble drier with a heap pump in order to be nice to the environment. After a few years there was an issue with it and I called a repairman. He vented the refrigerant and refilled it as part of his repair.
My calculation said it was an equivalent emission of about 1300kg CO2. Environmental impact immediately went negative.
This will be an issue when everyone is heating their house with heat pumps. They are amazing, but you have to follow the rules when repairing and scrapping them.
I looked it up, it wasn't (in Denmark). He said he always does it that way. I printed out and gave him a copy of the relevant regulation. I'm sure it made all the difference...
Unless you're in a region where AC is not needed, you already need refrigerant in the AC system. It does add some refrigerant overall (since there's places that do not require AC, but may require heat pumps), but it's not that big a difference.
I don’t think so. Part of it is that chests tend to have more insulation (also the reason why mini-fridges are absolute dreck efficiency wise), and the coolant / radiator circuit won’t be set up properly: in a traditional vertical fridge the coolant circuit is through the back or racks (for freezers) and the radiator are on the back, if you lay it on its back the radiator is now on the bottom, and trying to heat up the insulation, with the coolant circuit also at the bottom.
What siblings said, and also some (mostly older) refrigerators have radiators on the back and depend on air convection to cool them. But the insulated container itself, including the cooling circuit, is OK to lay sideways. Long story short, you can do it, but you need to reconfigure some pipes.
Having the heat pump in the wrong position will reduce it's lifetime. Very likely there is a vat of lubricants at the bottom. If you flip it on the side one side of the pump cylinder will be flooded and possibly leak into the coolant curcuit. The top side will run dry and jam pretty fast.
Then we should definitely never use them. Honestly, this line of reasoning really grates my gears. Yeah a tiny portion of people can't use them, so nobody should use them, I shouldn't put one in my house, etc.
If that's not what you're stating, then what _are_ you stating? I don't get it.
Parent did not imply that nobody should use them, but maybe offered some valid points to explain why they might not be seeing a very wide adoption.
Your response seems more hostile than it needs to be.
I disagree. Parent's comment is like me posting an article on how toothbrushes work and this guy pops up and tells me that toothbrushes have some serious usability issues because Tetraplegic people can't use them.
Disagree. It's like someone posting an article about how amazing horse hair toothbrushes are and someone else comes along and points out why the world has largely moved on.
The usability issues with chest freezers are real and it's quite likely that a big portion of the energy savings is because the chest freezers in question don't do auto defrost. Plenty of people really don't want to deal with regularly emptying everything out to let all the ice buildup melt.
Did you read the original article? It is a one-side argument basically saying there's no reason at all to not use a chest fridge and the parent comment just objectively gave a few. If one aren't capable of rational thinking and be able to hold different views (ie pros and cons) simultaneously then they shouldn't be giving opinion at all. Next you know everyone holding a different opinion is just stupid or selfish or whatever.
That’s also something touched on in the article though with baskets. In my experience, these freezers are often for longer term storage anyways, so their contents usually isn’t changing often enough for this to be a problem
You are right for freezers, but the article mentions a freezer that was converted to a fridge, which implies that the contents are for shorter term storage and is a different use case.
Do you have a chest fridge as the main or only fridge in your house? Tell us about your experience?
I feel my comment was just a response to the article text. Particularly the paragraph stating:
"So - WHY mediocre food-spoiling fridges are being made? WHO makes decisions to manufacture them? Who awards them "stars" and other misleading awards? Why people continue to buy and use energy wasting and food-spoiling devices? Does anyone care about understanding anything?"
I would like all fridges to be as efficient as chest fridges but I think they are impractical for small and medium houses, elderly people, families, disabled people, short people and people who can never remember what they have in their fridge. I think they are a niche product that is only suitable for a tiny proportion of people.
PS. On a personal note my quick comment seems to have stressed you out so I'll endeavour to write clear non-gear grinding comments and you should probably get off the internet for a bit
> Do you have a chest fridge as the main or only fridge in your house? Tell us about your experience?
I grew up with a chest freezer in my house as a child. I never had any problems with it as a kid, I didn't need to get kilos of meat out of it, because I was a child and my parents cooked food for me. It doubled up as a kitchen countertop, but you'd have to keep it clear or you couldn't use it, which is a usability shit.
Did you? Tell me about your experience.
I'll say the real issues with chest freezers is that unless you design your kitchen around them they end up taking more space.
The best use IMHO for a chest freezer is for long-term storage of food that you occasionally need to use. I know people who use them for storing extra food, they buy huge amounts in bulk and even running the freezer 24/7 they save a lot of food money doing this. Most people (myself included) probably don't have the luxury of space.
> I feel my comment was just a response to the article text. Particularly the paragraph stating: "So - WHY mediocre food-spoiling fridges are being made? WHO makes decisions to manufacture them? Who awards them "stars" and other misleading awards? Why people continue to buy and use energy wasting and food-spoiling devices? Does anyone care about understanding anything?"
Yeah, the article in question is short sighted and I disagree with many of the points the author makes. Usually I'll quote the text I'm responding to, instead of the article in general. This makes it less likely for some random internet nob head to come along and misinterpret what you're saying ;).
> I would like all fridges to be as efficient as chest fridges medium houses, elderly people, families, disabled people, short people and people who can never remember what they have in their fridge.
No, I disagree
> I think they are impractical for small houses
Yes, I agree
> I think they are a niche product that is only suitable for a tiny proportion of people.
Yes, I agree
*But they're still useful!*
For individual use, sure they're a tiny proportion, but what about industrial use, catering?
They're useful for specific situations and poo-pooing them _ENTIRELY_ because of some issues is a short sighted approach that I see EVERYWHERE in real life and online, and it boggles my mind.
You can say your post doesn't say they're useless for everyone, but I would say it heavily implies it.
> PS. On a personal note my quick comment seems to have stressed you out so I'll endeavour to write clear non-gear grinding comments
You shouldn't change how you write because I took umbrage with it, that's an issue with the internet today, don't change who you are just because some arsehole online didn't like what you wrote!
> and you should probably get off the internet for a bit
You should probably stop telling people what to do.
Chest freezers are not meant for daily use. We have a normal vertical frige/freezer combo in the kitchen, and a large chest freezer in the basement for storing berries, meat etc. over the winter. I access the chest freezer maybe once a month to move stuff to the kitchen freezer.
Exactly. The original article's "WHY"'s are narrow sighted and only focusing on energy efficiency. There's a whole load of other factors that led to the more popular fridge design and thinking about it for just one minute would have led them to realise that.
Maybe short people *could* get a stand but that would be a *horrible* idea. Too much of your body mass will be over the freezer, falling in is a substantial safety risk. Falling headfirst into a hole is a position that can be hard to escape even for those in good shape. This is a known hazard of winter recreation (falling into an unseen hollow under the snow) for which the only real defense is not to go alone as you're unlikely to survive long enough for search and rescue to get to you even if you are able to call them.
Space efficiency comes to mind as well on overall usability, can't stack anything above it (aside from storage shelves way above), kitchens are rarely big enough to store such a horizontal device, let alone in places where the $/m2 is high, like many city centers.
Also practical reasons, in horizontal config it's way harder to avoid my tomatoes getting squished by leftover casseroles, let alone having a small item roll around to the bottom never to be found again.
Never mind that, the major issue is real estate: a horizontal fridge uses twice the real estate, and in a Western country the cost of that small patch of ground will vastly exceed the running costs of the fridge.
Do you feel that a vertical fridge with a 'normal' outer door and individual drawers or doors in both the fridge and freezer sections could compartmentalise the fridge and give better energy efficiency and require fewer engineering changes?
I'm inclined to think that engineering improvements to a vertical fridge is easier than the changes required for a chest fridge.
I don't know what it's called or if it's commonly available but I saw a video of a fridge where the shelves are metal racks that can be raised up out of the fridge, so they are easily accessible. The air itself mostly stays in the fridge.
In the winter, when it's quite cold out, I often wonder why I'm paying to make cold air when there is free cold air available outside. What about a fridge that takes in air from outdoors?
Yeah, I really wish there was more focus on not wasting energy. Off the top of my head:
We have a normal furnace/air conditioner combo (I live in a climate where summer air conditioning is essential), it has no concept of outside air temperature. I really would like a system where it doesn't have the concept of being set to cool/off/heat, but rather a concept of ideal temperature/heat-to/cool-to. Before running the high energy systems it looks at the outside air temp to see if it would be more efficient to turn on a fan to bring in outside air. It also will use that fan to adjust the temperature towards ideal but will not use the high energy systems to do so.
The HVAC should also be able to communicate with the refrigerator. If heat is desired in the house the refrigerator uses coils inside the house to dispose of it's waste heat. If heat is not desired it uses outside coils.
I think of the shaded parts back porch as a giant walk-in (out?) fridge most of the winter, and have considered getting someone’s discarded chest freezer mostly to reduce the likelihood of critters and to moderate the effects of a slight overnight freeze.
Generally speaking you want conditioned cooled air, not just cooled air.
A huge part of an AC system (and, a fridge is basically a small AC unit) is dehumidifying as well. Functionally, you'd now need to add a de-humidification circuit to the system if you used outside air, since you don't have any humidity control.
Have two transparent interior rolling shutters. Open only one section on selection motion.
Or just have the best of both worlds, a chest fridge, with a transparent interior, which moves upward, allowing access via a rolling shutter.
Or have a airlock, were a automated retrieving gadget brings you your product in standardized containers? Similar to ice cream dispsensers or softdrink coolers?
Basically a portal crane traversing the chest cooler, extracting a "cooling" pillar on demand, which then only guarants acess on demand.
I've wondered if it might be more energy efficient to build home systems more like commercial ones. Make it walk-in but with a double door so you don't spill all the cold air when you open it. The freezer spills into the refrigerator so the cold isn't lost. Since it's built in size is of minimal importance and you can put a lot of insulation on it.
I had a vertical fridge-freezer (Bosch I think), where the fridge and freezer were separate compartments, but behind the main door, the freezer had slide-out drawers instead of shelves.
I always thought that design would also work well for the fridge section. Instead of shelves, you have drawers, which better keep the cold air in, and are also easier to use - no more reaching over things to get something at the back of the shelf.
Or perhaps there's a market for some kind of sliding drawer to replace shelves in existing machines. Unfortunately I think they are all completely non-standard sizes. Another area that is crying out for standardization, modularity etc.
what we have is a mix - some drawers on the bottom (2 layers), and shelves on top (3 layers IIRC). It mixes nicely, since shelves have bigger 'real capacity' in my opinion and its easier to put in non-standard shapes
Using chest freezers with an inkbird (or other PID temperature controller) is very common in beer homebrewing for kegerators or temperature controlling fermentation. I have 2 (a 5 cu ft one for fermentation and a 7 cu ft one for a kegerator) and they both rarely run.
I still have a normal upright fridge in my kitchen though. I think it's take some clever planning to make it so that a chest freezer fits into a kitchen decor since floor/counter space is usually the toughest thing to save when designing a kitchen.
I've wondered about fitting an inner door on each shelf of the fridge. I wonder if you'd save enough energy to warrant manufacture and shipping of clip-on doors?
Freezers can be vertical as you don't require easy access multiple times a day, don't require shelves as solid frozen food can be stacked without getting squished, you don't put pots, plates, etc in them, don't require drawers as you don't want multiple temperature and humidity zones, and on and on and on.
The efficiency increase is also greatly exaggerated in the article. For one see the comment by avian in here. Secondly that converted freezer has a lot more insulation than a fridge because of its thicker walls (which take more space) and also the lack of ventilation for moisture than any modern fridge has. And thirdly we have no real comparison with the same usage, as far as I know that person might open it every 2 days.
If we ignore all those problems we might as well weld a box shut and be happy with perfect efficiency at zero usability.
I guess their device is something similar to the homebrewing tool that I use Inkbird to control fridge/freezer temperature. Except from the less wasting cold air, I dislike the chest freezer for food storage because it's difficult to organize and then find things at the bottom.
I have one in my garage and use it as a meat buffer. When there's a good sale, we stock up. Over the next months, we draw down the supply, topping back up if there's another exceptional sale. The highlight of the year is around Thanksgiving when stores have loss leader turkeys on sale. We drive from store to store (they're clustered, which is handy) in one trip, usually ending up with ten to twelve turkeys that fill up the chest freezer. Come January stores often will have them on sale again trying to free up space during the part of the year with low amount of turkey buying. Those replace any turkeys we cooked during the holidays. We also once bought 1/4 of a cow, which we'll probably do again in the summer.
Is my maths right here? He claims that the average fridge in average home is
1kwh per day (quick google suggests is correct #). And he claims to run his on 0.1kwh. So roughly roughly thats 1kwh per day saving.
If everyone in Uk (about 25 million households) used his fridge it would save
25m kwh / day is 25 GWh / day or 9125 Gwh or
9Tera Wh
per year?
UK uses 300 Tera Wh per year of elec. (UN source from datacommons.org)
So changing fridges will save 1/30 of electrical use.
Just how much of an argument is there for funding a "not so optional"
change to peoples lifestyles and domestic arrangements?
Some combination of household goods, household insulation, reduced car useage
Good napkin calculus exercise: how much the extra square meter of the kitchen in a typical apartment costs? (For US readers: most fridge users in the world are living in apartments, not houses). Because you cannot just add one square meter there, size of the kitchen is predetermined by an architect. So in order to use a chest instead of vertical design one have to rent or buy a bigger apartment. And then let's calculate extra heating/air conditioning cost for those bigger apartment too.
It's good to live in a big house and have a choice. But realistically almost no one else has that choice.
If access and storage area per floor area is the problem for chest fridges, would a fridge with sliding drawer-style shelves be a good compromise?
The drawer compartments could have holes (for air to circulate) when closed (like current "grill" shelves), and a mechanism that closes them and isolates the drawn-out drawer from the one below and above it.
This way you lose at most one drawer worth of cold air and heat only one drawer worth of products. The mechanism would be quite simple to build (just mechanical, shouldn't need any fancy electronics).
The downside being that you would have rigid fixed compartments (each shelve's size) whereas fridges tend to have adjustable shelves.
The advantage of a chest-style freezer/fridge is that cold air is trapped inside because the only opening is at the top. With drawers, the cold air from the drawers above the open one will still partly spill out. Plus then you have more seams that might not close perfectly than with a door.
Yes that's all true but is the difference worth the money vs convenience tradeoff? I've used chest freezers before and it's not great to lean down to lift a large chunk of meat out of.
You are right but the convenience I was thinking about is mostly the floor space. Many people living in cities have small houses and space is literally at a premium. The extra electricity cost of a vertical fridge could be offset by the cost of the space on the floor to accommodate the equivalent chest fridge.
About that other kind of convenience, shouldn't a chest fridge be long and shallow to have everything reachable from the opening without having to lift stuff and dig?
> About that other kind of convenience, shouldn't a chest fridge be long and shallow to have everything reachable from the opening without having to lift stuff and dig?
There's a tradeoff between interior volume and convenience. And since most people who want convenience get a vertical model, I think interior volume wins a lot of the time. Someone who buys 1/2 of a cow, or takes home a deer just needs to freeze the whole thing. They don't necessarily need convenient access to all of the contents.
What would happen if you could get the chest freezer where the door doesn't swing open vertical, but rises vertical upwards? The door could become a work surface. When you need access, you could push a button, or lift it and the entire door would lift straight up. Anything on top, would remain in place. Now for something like this to work it would need a series of shelves (grated shelves to allow the cold air to remain inside) on the interior that could move up. Sort of like a vertical lazy susan.
Essentially, the chest freezer could become part of the kitchen work surfaces or it could be come an island work area, not taking up valuable real estate - it would be the valuable real estate. I have always thought this could be the way instead of vertical standing models.
I can imagine a permanently closed fridge with inspection cameras inside and an app to select which box to take out. Then something like this [1] will deliver the box to a tiny opening acting as an airlock, or take a box and park it inside. And of course $499 upfront plus $99 per month for the app, advertising, and front door delivery to refill empty boxes, and no self serviceable parts, and mandatory subscription to a $19 monthly cleaning service, and... I think I could keep going on like this for a while. Lots of ideas for a front camera /s
A cursory Google seems to say this is not a thing, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be, apart from having almost no market to justify its complicated manufacture.. and sliding baskets are probably cheaper and more practical
Something that meany seem to be missing in the comments is that this is a fridge (for cooling stuff), not a freezer (for deep.freezing stuff). He turned the freezer into a fridge, which seems to make sense, as gravity keeps the cold air better in a horizontal fridge.
THey are not as practical, as you have to stack stuff onto each other and it is easier to find space for a vertical fridge in a kitchen, but from a pure energy consumtion perspective this makes sense.
If the mentioned energy consumtion is correct, it is really quite low. A good new fidge that size without freezer uses about 90 kWh per year, which is about twice as much as his fridge.
Watts are handy if your electricity is priced around 11.4 cents per kWh. If that's the case, 1 Watt continuously = 1 USD per year. (scale up or down to suit your tariff)
It’s geofenced - if I access it directly from my residential connection in Germany, I get the same, but if I use my Tailscale exit node in the US, it works fine.
Lot of vertical fridge inefficiency could be simply resolved by having glass door, so you could check content without opening the door and then just quickly go for things you want.
But yeah it's convenience over efficiency and it would require also a lot of empty space above fridge which can be ulitized inb much better way, while there is hardly any space wasted above my ~210cm tall fridge and I still use the top to store some things which I could not to with chest fridge.
When moving such a fridge, you need to leave it powered off for a long time before plugging it back in (and probably before initially moving it, just to be safe).
Otherwise, the cheap compressors they use will foul the coolant lines with oil, ruining the fridge. The purpose of waiting is to allow anything that started to slosh up time to trickle back down. Also, keep the fridge as level as possible while moving it.
You can offset this by keeping the vertical fridge or freezer full of bottled waters if you don't use all the space. It actually makes it easier for the fridge to maintain temperature since the thermal mass inside is higher. The bottles take up the volume that would otherwise be cold air. The bottles help a bit obstructing the outflow of cold air as well.
But what's the cost of cooling those bottles when they replace something that was removed?
I like the idea of thermal mass in a refrigerator or freezer (it took me a while to figure out why milk at home would never last to it's shelf date--the grocery store has a huge thermal mass to it's dairy cases, the milk on the shelf gets much less exposure to warm air than the milk at home) but if you're going to eliminate dead air space I think it's best done with empty boxes, not water.
>A modern-era Energy Star-rated fridge, by comparison, might only use 350 kWh annually. At the same $.10 per kWh price, that's around $.10 a day, $2.9 per month and $35 per year
I admire efficiency a lot but I don’t think digging around in a chest freezer is worth saving $31.50 a year. Others may feel differently.
I've been thinking of doing that for a decade now but be aware that modern chest fridges are built so cheaply they do not have the same insulation level as old-school chest fridges.
ie. if you are getting it from walmart for $100, it's probably garbage insulation and the compressor will run all the time
Why don't they make chest fridge/freezers with a carousel built in that lets you cycle baskets up and around; coupled with a glass ceiling/door you could see what's inside and bring it up before you open it!
Thank you for all the ingenious ideas for a chest-style refrigerator/freezer. I have a need for one, and the tips and tricks posted here will save energy and make some old folks very happy.
Q2: It's impossible to go to the other end of the galaxy, live there for a few days, and come back in 10 days, even at the speed of light. How do you explain your trip?
A: Michel told me that his journey was made using what he called "trans-substantiation". The main part of the galactic journey does not take place in space-time, but outside it.
You can only leave space-time (or return to it) at a sufficient distance from the nearest star, otherwise you will explode.
Where I live they drive the biggest pickup trucks imaginable mostly to piss off anyone who thinks the environment or planet matters. Sometimes they purposefully billow black smoke from those same giant pickup trucks just to provoke anyone who cares. Do you think many people in that world will inconvenience themselves enough to use this refrigerator? Yeah, I didn't think so either. Our planet is so fucked, but hey, we still have the freedom to display our total lack of respect for other beings.
I would like to suggest to live without a fridge - it is absolutely possible.
Of course it depends on many things, but if you adapt a little bit you will not need a fridge. Fresh food is more healthy, anyway.
I just got into the situation of living without a fridge while constantly travelling between two places. After a while I realized that I do not need a fridge at all. Even after settling on one place I still do not need it.
Can I ask where you live? I know this attitude is common in some cultures more than others. I also know the viability of eating a healthy diet without your own refrigeration in some places will be next to impossible. Bulk frozen vegetables are pretty important when you don't have local access to fresh ones.
Which means a lot of travel to buy food. No refrigeration = daily trips to the store. It also means a lot more discarded packaging because you have to buy highly perishable stuff in much smaller packages.
Actually not. A lot of people have a freezer, but one set to "fridge mode" (temperature greater 0 degrees celsius)? I have a chest fridge that I use like this, but I searched a while to find one which has a thermostat supporting temperatures above 0 degrees celsius. Most of them only support freezing, and you have to construct some custom temperature-controlled power on/off mechanism (I actually did that with my old device which could only freeze) to use it as a fridge.
Except it's neither of those things and why the normal side opening fridge is the prevalent kind despite its poor power efficiency.
It occupies double the floor area for half the storage, and you have to take everything out to access the bottom most shelves. Even on boats where power efficiency is critical, I've seen people go for the side opening type if they possibly can, because it's just that much more practical.