by doughecka
3 subcomments
- Reminds me of Fly Away Home with the round fridge that would lift out of the counter. True story:
"The refrigerator is round, rising from under the granite countertop with the touch of the button.
“The pneumatic fridge works with air compression,” she says. “You step on the button and it pops up and the racks spin like a lazy Susan. Cold air is heavy so it stays cold.”"
https://www.thestar.com/life/home-and-garden/paula-lishman-a...
- I read this back in 2009, happy to see it's still on the internet.
Obviously with today's electricity prices it would use more than $5 per year but even doubled it is extremely cheap.
My issue with the concept is space and convenience. My upright fridge is about this size but it would take up too much space in my kitchen on its side. Worse again that you can't keep anything on top because that's where the door is.
But more crucially, with a chest freezer you can only easily access the stuff on top. If something is a few levels down you have to move a lot of stuff to access it. I wish they came with shelves that cantilevered out like a toolbox, or a vertical lid on rails that lifted like a drawer
- It's a cool idea, and might be great for a secondary fridge. For a primary fridge though, it's so much more convenient to have direct access to everything through a vertical door. I like energy efficiency, but I'm willing to pay 300kWh a year (around $40 here) for that convenience, let alone the space efficiency.
by Hextinium
1 subcomments
- This reminds me of the Technology Connections fridge rant video. Similar arguments all around, the dumping effect of cold out of a vertical fridge is pretty crazy to watch with a thermal camera.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CGAhWgkKlHI
- So the cold air spills out when you open it. However the thermal mass of the air inside the fridge can’t be much compared to the thermal mass of the contents of a normal fridge. And of course the more full your fridge, the less cold air there actually is in there to lose anyway.
No doubt that a chest fridge would be more efficient on paper, but it’s far more inconvenient for everyday use. I would question if the efficiency gains are lost by all the time you’d spend with it open digging around for stuff.
by calmbonsai
1 subcomments
- This only makes practical sense if your energy costs are exorbitant compared to the western industrialized world and you don't care about cold-storage volume relative to room square footage and/or ready access to stored items.
Thus, vertical refrigerators and freezers absolutely dominate.
by wiskinator
2 subcomments
- Ohhh the links at the bottom of this guys site are wild and good reading.
https://thiaoouba.com/
Please note I am disputing his science on the efficacy of a vertical fridge.
by mememememememo
1 subcomments
- Why?
a: space.
A standup fridge freezer is floor space efficient.
How much rent is the chest freezer using per year :)
Made up numbers 10k for 1000sqft
10 per sq ft
So say $40 a year in rent. Still not too bad I guess
- Because I have more vertical space in my kitchen than I got horizontal one.
by PaulKeeble
1 subcomments
- Its possible to design internal structures such that its easier to use as a Fridge and freezer with some loss of space to avoid having to reach down into it. It would waste space and some efficiency however, the more complicated it becomes with assisted lifting and such the worse the gap would become. But the problem is often space, a lot of kitchens do not have 2x the floor area to be putting in chests making them good for secondary storage somewhere else but not a primary kitchen appliance.
There is no doubt its better thermally just because cold air falls out the front of a normal fridge/freezer and huge amounts of energy are wasted everytime you open the door. A chest design looses considerably less of its cooled air but its also a lot more awkward to use and ends up less floor space efficient.
- Though I also have a home chest freezer in the garage, I take this approach to my camper van setup as well. I have a converted (vintage) van, which means it wasn’t intended as a camper, and part of my build-out strategy has been to use removable things that also serve me at home in the event of an emergency or an expansion need, things like a solar panel, LiPo battery, fridge/freezer, cooktop, and space heater.
The fridge is a Dometic CFX 35 which opens at the top and tends to allow for getting at things without losing a lot of cooling. At first, it was also nice to be able to set things on it or use it as a seat (horizontal surfaces are the biggest hard-to-find in a camper van) but that became annoying when needing snacks or other quick access. So I recently built a small cabinet with a pull-out slider on which the fridge lives. Then, I always have the top storage but don’t need to move anything to get at the fridge, but can also briefly use the fridge as a footrest or similar.
- This is presumably why vertical freezers have drawers. Theoretically if all the space is taken by drawers, there is no cold air that can immediately fall out. I guess the movement of the drawer would at least disrupt the air in that drawer though, unless it has an individual lid. It does seem like drawers could be used on fridges as well, and gain some of the benefit of this and still be practical. Although not so convenient for the top one.
by mapontosevenths
1 subcomments
- I have a bad back and bending over hurts. Statistically it will also start to hurt you someday.
Even if we ignore the pain, there is no way to organize food in a chest freezer effectively. To reach items on the bottom one must remove all the food that sits above it. This wastes time and effort that could better be spent on other things. Meaning the opportunity cost is too high, even if it saves me money on electricity.
- Idea:
If you have a vertical fridge on your countertop and you change the door so that it slides down and the cold air stays inside the part of the fridge still closed by the door, you could sort the things in your fridge by frequency of accessing them.
- Modern refrigerators are designed for browsing. A chest fridge could save a person a lot of calories over time
- Feel free to vote this into oblivion for irrelevance, it really is irrelevant. However, I've seen this blog show up here a few times and every time I initially read it as mrbeast.net and groan internally.
- I did this, with a regular chest freezer and a thermostat. It used hardly any energy, but it was hard to clean and died after about five years.
- It's more about freezers than fridges. Less frequent access and ton more work to get the temps back. I never thought about it but it was such an a-ha moment for me when I recently learned about it that I'm genuinely flabbergasted why it's not more popular.
- Just have to make it either easy to buy or easy to mod and emphasize energy savings and lots of people would be interested
Edit: looks like a few chest freezers have a "fridge" setting, which sounds like the easiest way to do this for those interested (maybe)
by takenotice
0 subcomment
- Practical tips from a UFO cultist
Absolutely sound arguments for more efficient refrigeration, but I am way more interested in the bizarre context of the other content.
I love that the site navigation includes Sustainability, Solar House, Re-forest, Wildlife, then casually, Spacecraft! Ooookay, here we go.
He tells of his friend, Michael, who rode on a visiting spacecraft of beings from the biblical planet of Thiaoouba to see their home world and help humanity achieve spiritual enlightenment. He wrote a book of his experience and no scientist has been able disprove a single sentence in it.
Also it’s apparently a good idea to use a more efficient refrigerator or else we will destroy our planet with greenhouse gases before we can achieve transcendence.
“Threat ? The ultimate danger to our civilization comes from overheating the Earth's heat-generating interior due to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, which traps the planet's internal heat. This process is slow, but its eventual consequences are violent and irreversible. The very existence of Earth is at stake. There will be no second chance if people on Earth continue to ignore the advice...”
Edit:
I’m actually kind of into the Bioresonant t-shirt. It’d be good for a Phish show.
- No.
Drawers.
by globular-toast
0 subcomment
- Probably completely offset by having a home large enough to have a chest fridge.
- What’s the possibility of turning such a device 45 degrees (or even 90)? Would it ruin anything? Because then you could stack two and it wouldn’t be so bad.
- The answer to his question is right here.
by AndrewSwift
0 subcomment
- Drawers would solve this in a vertical fridge.
by burnt-resistor
0 subcomment
- More floor space per storage volume is why. Most dwellings in urban and some suburban areas are area constrained for everything, especially appliances, and unable to use chest type freezers my grandparents had to keep loads of venison and catfish in their lake house. It'd also be great™ if freezers used Vacuum Insulation Panels (VIPs).
- (2009)
- [dead]
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