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.
Now that is the coolest fridge I've ever seen. Found a video of it in action (yes, featuring the same dad joke all over the comments but that is not stopping me): https://youtu.be/RoGuvvzHY1A?t=416
Mostly yes. Upright fridge and freezer designs trade off efficiency for convenience (rooting around in a chest fridge/freezer can be annoying). https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI
Mind-bending indeed, but looks pretty impractical. In an ordinary fridge, if your egg carton is a bit out of place, your door may not close properly. In this one, you're going to have liquid omelette slathered all over the place, and how do you even clean the bottom of that thing?
Any country where eggs are industrially washed before showing up in grocery stores.
Their protective coating (called the bloom, I believe?) goes away when that happens, and they become susceptible to salmonella when they stay at room temperature.
It's true. The bloom on the eggs protects them from whatever nastiness is on the outside.
This includes salmonella, which may be present if your flock is infected in the poop on the outside of the shell (remember hens only have one egress port), plus any other sources of environmental pathogens, of which there are many.
When the bloom is washed off the egg, pathogens have an easier time penetrating the shell and consuming the nutritious yummy bits inside. At room temperature, they can multiply rapidly. Refrigeration slows the rate of growth.
An unwashed egg retains the barrier, and stays fresh longer without refrigeration.
YMMV on household acceptance of dirty eggs on countertops, but they are cleaner than many other items within arms' reach that we are conditioned to not think about. :)
The idea is nice, but one thing I use a refrigerator for constantly is putting rectangular things in there. A box of cake, half of the lasagne left over in its oven dish, various containers, et cetera. Even cartons of milk and yoghurt have a square or oblong horizontal plane. Those round shelves are ideal for cilinders with a small diameter; bottles of condiment and beer, basically.
The video down thread shows, the internal food-supports are all wire meshes with big gaps. The cold air is not squirted up and out like a syringe, it's more like the food is kept in a birdcage that's lowered and raised out of a pool of cold air.
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
the toolbox idea is actually genius. ive been using a chest freezer as a fridge for about 2 years now and the biggest pain is definitely digging through layers of stuff to find what you need. some kind of stackable wire baskets that slide out would solve like 90% of the usability problem honestly
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.
Most people in dense urban areas would actually pay less. By going vertical you’re freezing a whole m2 that was otherwise necessarily occupied by the fridge. In most places, 300 kWh is much cheaper than an extra irrevocable m2 for your fridge.
Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge.
You can't. A chest fridge/freezer becomes a gravitational singularity sucking random items from every corner of the kitchen to its lid. You can keep trying to return them to their rightful place but in the end it is a fruitless task as the rate of accumulation becomes faster than your speed of repatriation and the contents of the freezer are eventually lost to time behind the "event horizon" of its surface.
They seem to have mixed up horizontal and vertical, and if they did, then my reading is that they're saying the cost of the extra floor space (and the loss of the "shelf" space on top of the fridge) when using a chest fridge makes the economics unfavourable for people in dense urban areas, even with the energy savings.
At least, I'm hoping that's what they meant. If they really meant horizontal and vertical in the way they used it then I've got no idea either.
I didn't get it until reading your comment, but I think perhaps they meant 'vertical' as in 'it opens vertically' (chest freezer)—i.e. they didn't mix them up exactly, just used them differently than we expected.
Yeah, I understand your first sentence, but the last part of their comment was
"Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge."
Don't they mean a horizontal fridge is a chest fridge? Which would make it sound like they want their whole comment to be in support of a chest fridge? Which is why none of it makes any sense to me.
That's what makes me think they've simply mixed up horizontal and vertical, because you can't (conveniently) store things on top of a chest fridge, but you can store things on top of a vertical fridge. Basically I think they've got a coherent point if you swap vertical and horizontal throughout their whole comment.
But if I put things on top of it, now I can't get at the food.
I mean, I have one of these as a meat freezer, and sometimes I put things on top of it, and then my wife gets mad at me and moves that thing somewhere because otherwise nobody can open it.
Things on top of my vertical fridge on the other hand (my cat for example), can stay there indefinitely.
Wouldn't a solution be to have the opening on the side and pull it toward you, like a "box on wheels"? As long as the sides of the "box" are thermally insulated, it seems like a sound solution for the stated problem (but certainly not one that's mechanically the cheapest/simplest).
A friend suggested a bottom-hinged door like that on a garbage chute, though well sealed, and as wide as the fridge, so the sides of the door don't get in the way of storing long objects in the fridge.
Horizontal vs vertical is determined by the orientation of the object's longest dimension. Portrait pictures on a wall and fridges with doors that open out are vertical, landscape pictures on a wall and chest freezers are horizontal.
I have cabinets over my vertical fridge that has things put in it. There's only like a 15 cm gap between for airflow. How do you slap a cabinet on top of a horizontal fridge?
If you completely remodeled a kitchen around a chest fridge it might not be too terribly inconvenient. But the major blocker is that virtually every kitchen is designed with a perfect spot for a tall, relatively shallow fridge.
It's inconvenient as soon as you need to get something from the bottom of the fridge, kitchen layout does not change this one at all. And I grew up in a home with multiple chest fridges in addition to a shelved ones so I know the hurdles.
They are good to store something you're not accessing all the time though, like frozen berries etc.
Yeah, my in-laws literally stand around the fridge with it open for multiple minutes while they shuffle food around to get to things they've tetrised into the back, and then to re-organize once they've gotten what they need.
They periodically live with us because they're quite old at this point, and my wife and I have already discussed replacing our fridge/freezer combo with a standalone fridge and switching solely to a chest freezer in the mudroom just so they stop doing this with the freezer, too.
The freezer is almost entirely for things already in boxes anyway. Frozen wontons, frozen ice cream cones, microwaveable meals, frozen blocks of fish. It's all easy to organize in a chest freezer.
I'd never considered a chest fridge before, and if I didn't have a wife and kids, as of today I'd be seriously considering it. As it is, can't trust kids not to make an inaccessible mess of something like that, and wife wouldn't like the kitchen arrangement becoming wonky. Though the fridge's current position makes it clear a previous owner didn't understand anything about kitchen layouts when they remodeled a MCM home.
Maybe I could put a chest fridge there with cabinetry above (gap between), and then some place we currently have cabinets all the way to the floor, remove the bottom and put in another chest fridge.
Might be something to consider once we've fixed all the supreme fuckups previous owners did.
It inherently takes more usable space, there's no design that won't lose space, which makes them impractical in smaller homes. To visualise it, for those living in more spacious areas, imagine a "galley" kitchen: 8 spaces one standard unit size, arranged in 4 on each of two opposite walls, with an aisle in between. One unit may be lost to a door. One must be a hob, another the sink. The hob must not have storage above within 60-70cm vertically, due to fire risk; and limits what may be adjacent as well. A window may prevent the use of some spaces above waist height.
A door that opens outwards uses space that has to be clear anyway because that's where you walk. A door that opens upwards takes space that could have been used for another appliance or storage, or the upper half of a fridge twice the size.
The only way round that would be for it to be able to slide outwards, but that's also inconvenient.
Having said all that, they are a great idea if you have the space.
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.
Some of us live off-grid. Some of us live on-grid but the grid is unstable (or we think it may become unstable in the future). Some of us do not have the same time/effort versus money tradeoffs that you do. Some of us want to reduce our emissions more than others. Some of us just really enjoy optimizing.
It registers to me as the same sort of impulse that drives optimizing a bit of rarely-used code. It's more of a principle-based interest than a practical one. In other words, it's very human.
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.
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.
I dispute the convenience, but I think the science has been tested. When you open a regular fridge, because cold air is denser than warm air, much of the cold air immediately falls out, so the fridge needs to work to re-chill the air once you close it. Even when it isn't opened, some amount of cold air leaks out the seals toward the bottom of the fridge (and warmer air leaks in through the top). Chest fridge (or freezer) solves these problems.
That said, most of the thermal mass in the fridge is the food, and after that probably the shelving, so as long as the seals aren't blown, the turnover of air on opening isn't a huge deal.
The science here is also perfectly backed by empiric evidence. Just measure the kWh used in a year and compare. It doesn't really matter how a chest fridge is more efficient, it just is.
The convenience is not as easy to quantify, but I would bet that an experiment would quickly point out that chest fridges are terrible for elderly, children, and anyone with reduced mobility. I'd hypothesise that even able bodied people would get annoyed when they are cooking — I know I would be.
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.
For exactly the same reason : space is scarce but power even more. Power can also become unavailable in a degraded situation much often than on land. Therefore, it is a better design choice to have a chest freezer.
In a city appartement where floor space is scarce, convenience is a key feature and power costs barely nothing, it is a less obvious choice.
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.
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.
Perhaps the solution is to rethink the role of the fridge in the kitchen. It could be designed to be a part of a kitchen island, or have cabinets placed above it. In conventional kitchens, a chest does not make sense. But it could be well integrated if we start with the assumptions the fridge will be a chest.
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.
The door of a fridge is usually used for a lot of frequently used items. Eggs, milk, butter, and what have you. You would have to address losing that in terms of convenience and storage space.
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.
Yeah, we have a french door fridge with a lower drawer freezer, and even with that being split into an upper drawer maybe 8" deep, and a lower one ~12" deep. Everything but the top layer and maybe one layer under that, is where food goes to die. And that setup is vastly better at this all than a 30" deep chest, except that when you pull the drawer out, all the benefits of a chest are lost. So (nearly) the worst of both worlds.
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.
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.
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.
We have two chest freezers for long-term breast milk storage, and the wife ad I have already discussed replacing our conventional freezer/fridge combo for a standalone fridge and only using the chest freezers once the breast milk is all gone. I'm pretty excited about it. Chest freezers are in the nearby mudroom, and it's not like a fridge, where you are grabbing tons of vegetables, dairy, meat, etc. for a single meal.
If you're using the freezer for a meal, you're probably pulling out frozen fish and nothing else, or a microwaveable meal, or something. You are't pulling out carrots, bok choy, pork, milk, cheese, etc. So put it outside the kitchen. A freezer is for storage. A kitchen is for food preparation. Not the same task.
Makes sense if the drawers completely fill the volume of the fridge, so most of the air is inside the drawers and there is minimal air loss when the door opens. If the drawer fronts were insulated, each drawer would effectively be its own chest.
Edit: On a reread, I'm guessing you were talking about individual refrigerated drawers? Multiple drawers in a single insulated box (as I interpreted it) could work though, as it would have less exterior surface area, use less insulation for the same thermal resistance and useable volume and have a single cooling unit, which might be more efficient. It would also fit existing fridge alcoves.
If you designed around it, it would fit where existing kitchens have drawers, and the space typically reserved for a vertical fridge would be occupied by shelving. Kind of a neat idea. Microwave drawers are a thing.
Under-counter refrigerators are also a thing. They're often not cheap, though. KitchenAid has a two-drawer one for around $3,000. But you can find off-brand ones for $700, too. I don't know if the KitchenAid is that much better. There are things to take into account. It's not just as simple as 'put short, 24" deep fridge where drawers go."
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.
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).
I don't think so? The PDF includes "today (2009)", and also "started in 2004". It's been featured on HN before.. as far back as 2009. Unfortunately the archives first caught the (same) text in 2021, so that's not helpful.
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...
Now that is the coolest fridge I've ever seen. Found a video of it in action (yes, featuring the same dad joke all over the comments but that is not stopping me): https://youtu.be/RoGuvvzHY1A?t=416
That entire place is mind-bending.
That's a very cool fridge. But how much difference does that make in practice?
Air doesn't have much mass, right? How much energy does it actually cost to cool the air in a fridge? (vs the solid parts of the fridge, and the food)
Looks like the OP's fridge uses 10-20x less power than a typical fridge, is that entirely due to the air not spilling out?
Mostly yes. Upright fridge and freezer designs trade off efficiency for convenience (rooting around in a chest fridge/freezer can be annoying). https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI
Mind-bending indeed, but looks pretty impractical. In an ordinary fridge, if your egg carton is a bit out of place, your door may not close properly. In this one, you're going to have liquid omelette slathered all over the place, and how do you even clean the bottom of that thing?
Who, apart from Americans, puts eggs into the fridge?
Any country where eggs are industrially washed before showing up in grocery stores.
Their protective coating (called the bloom, I believe?) goes away when that happens, and they become susceptible to salmonella when they stay at room temperature.
What's the reasoning behind washing eggs to make them more susceptible to salmonella?
Because it cleans the poop off.
So if an egg has poop on it, it's less likely to have salmonella?
There is a coating on the outside of the egg which prevents that.
Washing the egg removes the poo and the coating.
No source provided and this may just be some myth.
It's true. The bloom on the eggs protects them from whatever nastiness is on the outside.
This includes salmonella, which may be present if your flock is infected in the poop on the outside of the shell (remember hens only have one egress port), plus any other sources of environmental pathogens, of which there are many.
When the bloom is washed off the egg, pathogens have an easier time penetrating the shell and consuming the nutritious yummy bits inside. At room temperature, they can multiply rapidly. Refrigeration slows the rate of growth.
An unwashed egg retains the barrier, and stays fresh longer without refrigeration.
YMMV on household acceptance of dirty eggs on countertops, but they are cleaner than many other items within arms' reach that we are conditioned to not think about. :)
Well, it's a prototype. Any production model would need to watch for fingers too, so it'd have to be gentle.
Just as elevator doors won't crush a person due to sensors and such.
The cleaning part is an interesting question.
The idea is nice, but one thing I use a refrigerator for constantly is putting rectangular things in there. A box of cake, half of the lasagne left over in its oven dish, various containers, et cetera. Even cartons of milk and yoghurt have a square or oblong horizontal plane. Those round shelves are ideal for cilinders with a small diameter; bottles of condiment and beer, basically.
Wouldn’t that just push the cold air into the room when it pops out.
Also, is that a big bottle of maple syrup the fridge?
The video down thread shows, the internal food-supports are all wire meshes with big gaps. The cold air is not squirted up and out like a syringe, it's more like the food is kept in a birdcage that's lowered and raised out of a pool of cold air.
I was similarly reminded but couldn't recall the source. Thanks! It seems like it might be a worthy adaptation to commercial chest freezers/fridges.
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
There's an easy solution for the chest freezer, I've been using IKEA recycling bins, the plastic is cold proof, see: https://youtu.be/ydbsVS5rbSM?is=FVhiLHx4Uh94nb0k
You could just have a vertical fridge with "tub" drawers which individually contain the cold air.
the toolbox idea is actually genius. ive been using a chest freezer as a fridge for about 2 years now and the biggest pain is definitely digging through layers of stuff to find what you need. some kind of stackable wire baskets that slide out would solve like 90% of the usability problem honestly
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.
Most people in dense urban areas would actually pay less. By going vertical you’re freezing a whole m2 that was otherwise necessarily occupied by the fridge. In most places, 300 kWh is much cheaper than an extra irrevocable m2 for your fridge.
Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge.
I put things on top of my vertical fridge all the time. Also, how do you access a chest fridge with items sitting on top of lid?
You can't. A chest fridge/freezer becomes a gravitational singularity sucking random items from every corner of the kitchen to its lid. You can keep trying to return them to their rightful place but in the end it is a fruitless task as the rate of accumulation becomes faster than your speed of repatriation and the contents of the freezer are eventually lost to time behind the "event horizon" of its surface.
source: my lost ice pops
This happens in our vertical one.
I need you to describe the pitfalls of doing the laundry in your Pratchett style!
I literally don't understand this comment at all. What point are you trying to make?
They seem to have mixed up horizontal and vertical, and if they did, then my reading is that they're saying the cost of the extra floor space (and the loss of the "shelf" space on top of the fridge) when using a chest fridge makes the economics unfavourable for people in dense urban areas, even with the energy savings.
At least, I'm hoping that's what they meant. If they really meant horizontal and vertical in the way they used it then I've got no idea either.
I didn't get it until reading your comment, but I think perhaps they meant 'vertical' as in 'it opens vertically' (chest freezer)—i.e. they didn't mix them up exactly, just used them differently than we expected.
Yeah, I understand your first sentence, but the last part of their comment was
"Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge."
Don't they mean a horizontal fridge is a chest fridge? Which would make it sound like they want their whole comment to be in support of a chest fridge? Which is why none of it makes any sense to me.
That's what makes me think they've simply mixed up horizontal and vertical, because you can't (conveniently) store things on top of a chest fridge, but you can store things on top of a vertical fridge. Basically I think they've got a coherent point if you swap vertical and horizontal throughout their whole comment.
I'm also wondering if "freezing" was meant to be "freeing".
But if I put things on top of it, now I can't get at the food.
I mean, I have one of these as a meat freezer, and sometimes I put things on top of it, and then my wife gets mad at me and moves that thing somewhere because otherwise nobody can open it.
Things on top of my vertical fridge on the other hand (my cat for example), can stay there indefinitely.
Wouldn't a solution be to have the opening on the side and pull it toward you, like a "box on wheels"? As long as the sides of the "box" are thermally insulated, it seems like a sound solution for the stated problem (but certainly not one that's mechanically the cheapest/simplest).
A friend suggested a bottom-hinged door like that on a garbage chute, though well sealed, and as wide as the fridge, so the sides of the door don't get in the way of storing long objects in the fridge.
Did you by any chance switch "vertical" and "horizontal" at every point in your comment?
The words are intrinsically ambiguous. A standard fridge opens horizontally but stands vertically. Is it vertical or horizontal?
Horizontal vs vertical is determined by the orientation of the object's longest dimension. Portrait pictures on a wall and fridges with doors that open out are vertical, landscape pictures on a wall and chest freezers are horizontal.
I have cabinets over my vertical fridge that has things put in it. There's only like a 15 cm gap between for airflow. How do you slap a cabinet on top of a horizontal fridge?
If you completely remodeled a kitchen around a chest fridge it might not be too terribly inconvenient. But the major blocker is that virtually every kitchen is designed with a perfect spot for a tall, relatively shallow fridge.
It's inconvenient as soon as you need to get something from the bottom of the fridge, kitchen layout does not change this one at all. And I grew up in a home with multiple chest fridges in addition to a shelved ones so I know the hurdles.
They are good to store something you're not accessing all the time though, like frozen berries etc.
I think that inconvenience could be manageable depending on how full the fridge is and what sort of organizing features it has.
It’s already pretty inconvenient to get something out of the back of a traditional fridge that is completely full.
Yeah, my in-laws literally stand around the fridge with it open for multiple minutes while they shuffle food around to get to things they've tetrised into the back, and then to re-organize once they've gotten what they need.
They periodically live with us because they're quite old at this point, and my wife and I have already discussed replacing our fridge/freezer combo with a standalone fridge and switching solely to a chest freezer in the mudroom just so they stop doing this with the freezer, too.
The freezer is almost entirely for things already in boxes anyway. Frozen wontons, frozen ice cream cones, microwaveable meals, frozen blocks of fish. It's all easy to organize in a chest freezer.
I'd never considered a chest fridge before, and if I didn't have a wife and kids, as of today I'd be seriously considering it. As it is, can't trust kids not to make an inaccessible mess of something like that, and wife wouldn't like the kitchen arrangement becoming wonky. Though the fridge's current position makes it clear a previous owner didn't understand anything about kitchen layouts when they remodeled a MCM home.
Maybe I could put a chest fridge there with cabinetry above (gap between), and then some place we currently have cabinets all the way to the floor, remove the bottom and put in another chest fridge.
Might be something to consider once we've fixed all the supreme fuckups previous owners did.
I find French door refrigerators work well. The bottom compartment makes it pretty easy to see everything.
I do have an upright freezer in the basement. If I ever needed to replace it I’d probably get a chest freezer.
It inherently takes more usable space, there's no design that won't lose space, which makes them impractical in smaller homes. To visualise it, for those living in more spacious areas, imagine a "galley" kitchen: 8 spaces one standard unit size, arranged in 4 on each of two opposite walls, with an aisle in between. One unit may be lost to a door. One must be a hob, another the sink. The hob must not have storage above within 60-70cm vertically, due to fire risk; and limits what may be adjacent as well. A window may prevent the use of some spaces above waist height.
A door that opens outwards uses space that has to be clear anyway because that's where you walk. A door that opens upwards takes space that could have been used for another appliance or storage, or the upper half of a fridge twice the size.
The only way round that would be for it to be able to slide outwards, but that's also inconvenient.
Having said all that, they are a great idea if you have the space.
Indeed. I could imagine a very neat one built into the cabinetry where the counter top could be lifted up or something.
It would be inconvenient to have to clear the counter each time you want to access the fridge.
I keep my counters largely clear so I can cook, anyway.
Well, but do you never have to open the fridge to get an ingredient, half way through cooking?
Cool idea indeed.
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
Couldn't find that in the 26 minute video. But for a total energy cost of $70 per year, why is this of interest to anyone?
Some of us live off-grid. Some of us live on-grid but the grid is unstable (or we think it may become unstable in the future). Some of us do not have the same time/effort versus money tradeoffs that you do. Some of us want to reduce our emissions more than others. Some of us just really enjoy optimizing.
It registers to me as the same sort of impulse that drives optimizing a bit of rarely-used code. It's more of a principle-based interest than a practical one. In other words, it's very human.
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.
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.
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.
Glad someone else notice this! That was a wild rabbit hole I just went down and I only scratched the surface.
I dispute the convenience, but I think the science has been tested. When you open a regular fridge, because cold air is denser than warm air, much of the cold air immediately falls out, so the fridge needs to work to re-chill the air once you close it. Even when it isn't opened, some amount of cold air leaks out the seals toward the bottom of the fridge (and warmer air leaks in through the top). Chest fridge (or freezer) solves these problems.
That said, most of the thermal mass in the fridge is the food, and after that probably the shelving, so as long as the seals aren't blown, the turnover of air on opening isn't a huge deal.
The science here is also perfectly backed by empiric evidence. Just measure the kWh used in a year and compare. It doesn't really matter how a chest fridge is more efficient, it just is.
The convenience is not as easy to quantify, but I would bet that an experiment would quickly point out that chest fridges are terrible for elderly, children, and anyone with reduced mobility. I'd hypothesise that even able bodied people would get annoyed when they are cooking — I know I would be.
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.
They are quite popular on sailboats.
For exactly the same reason : space is scarce but power even more. Power can also become unavailable in a degraded situation much often than on land. Therefore, it is a better design choice to have a chest freezer.
In a city appartement where floor space is scarce, convenience is a key feature and power costs barely nothing, it is a less obvious choice.
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.
Because I have more vertical space in my kitchen than I got horizontal one.
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.
Perhaps the solution is to rethink the role of the fridge in the kitchen. It could be designed to be a part of a kitchen island, or have cabinets placed above it. In conventional kitchens, a chest does not make sense. But it could be well integrated if we start with the assumptions the fridge will be a chest.
Refrigerated drawers in islands are definitely a thing in high end kitchens. But you typically have a large conventional fridge as well.
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.
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
$800 a month for rent is pretty good
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.
The door of a fridge is usually used for a lot of frequently used items. Eggs, milk, butter, and what have you. You would have to address losing that in terms of convenience and storage space.
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.
Yeah, we have a french door fridge with a lower drawer freezer, and even with that being split into an upper drawer maybe 8" deep, and a lower one ~12" deep. Everything but the top layer and maybe one layer under that, is where food goes to die. And that setup is vastly better at this all than a 30" deep chest, except that when you pull the drawer out, all the benefits of a chest are lost. So (nearly) the worst of both worlds.
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.
Modern refrigerators are designed for browsing. A chest fridge could save a person a lot of calories over time
By that logic, best fridge is no fridge at all ;)
Cup Noodles FTW
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.
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.
We have two chest freezers for long-term breast milk storage, and the wife ad I have already discussed replacing our conventional freezer/fridge combo for a standalone fridge and only using the chest freezers once the breast milk is all gone. I'm pretty excited about it. Chest freezers are in the nearby mudroom, and it's not like a fridge, where you are grabbing tons of vegetables, dairy, meat, etc. for a single meal.
If you're using the freezer for a meal, you're probably pulling out frozen fish and nothing else, or a microwaveable meal, or something. You are't pulling out carrots, bok choy, pork, milk, cheese, etc. So put it outside the kitchen. A freezer is for storage. A kitchen is for food preparation. Not the same task.
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)
Probably completely offset by having a home large enough to have a chest fridge.
No.
Drawers.
Makes sense if the drawers completely fill the volume of the fridge, so most of the air is inside the drawers and there is minimal air loss when the door opens. If the drawer fronts were insulated, each drawer would effectively be its own chest.
Edit: On a reread, I'm guessing you were talking about individual refrigerated drawers? Multiple drawers in a single insulated box (as I interpreted it) could work though, as it would have less exterior surface area, use less insulation for the same thermal resistance and useable volume and have a single cooling unit, which might be more efficient. It would also fit existing fridge alcoves.
If you designed around it, it would fit where existing kitchens have drawers, and the space typically reserved for a vertical fridge would be occupied by shelving. Kind of a neat idea. Microwave drawers are a thing.
They make them already, they just tend to be expensive. Look up Sub-zero.
Under-counter refrigerators are also a thing. They're often not cheap, though. KitchenAid has a two-drawer one for around $3,000. But you can find off-brand ones for $700, too. I don't know if the KitchenAid is that much better. There are things to take into account. It's not just as simple as 'put short, 24" deep fridge where drawers go."
+1
waist level, some below countertops, some above a freezer drawer. humidity settings.
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.
Drawers would solve this in a vertical fridge.
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)
he mentions inverter freezers at the end so it must have been updated more recently
I don't think so? The PDF includes "today (2009)", and also "started in 2004". It's been featured on HN before.. as far back as 2009. Unfortunately the archives first caught the (same) text in 2021, so that's not helpful.
rcfox's criticism from 2009 still stands (6 points, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865991