6 ms·
Chest Fridge (2009)
- nom 7mo agoNo. Drawers.
- catapart 7mo ago+1 waist level, some below countertops, some above a freezer drawer. humidity settings.
- femto 7mo agoMakes 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.
- nlawalker 7mo agoIf 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.
- KPGv2 7mo agoUnder-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."
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoThey make them already, they just tend to be expensive. Look up Sub-zero.
- gnabgib 7mo ago(2009)
- wolfi1 7mo agohe mentions inverter freezers at the end so it must have been updated more recently
- gnabgib 7mo agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=865991
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ashenke 7mo agoBecause I have more vertical space in my kitchen than I got horizontal one.
- tempestn 7mo agoIt'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.
- refactor_master 7mo agoMost 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 7mo agoI literally don't understand this comment at all. What point are you trying to make?
- frogulis 7mo agoThey 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- Hextinium 7mo agoThis 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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=CGAhWgkKlHI
- mhb 7mo agoCouldn'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?
- idle_zealot 7mo agoIt 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.
- anticorporate 7mo agoSome 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.
- mememememememo 7mo agoWhy? 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
- matthewfcarlson 7mo ago$800 a month for rent is pretty good
- anjel 7mo agoModern refrigerators are designed for browsing. A chest fridge could save a person a lot of calories over time
- zeroq 7mo agoIt'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.
- KPGv2 7mo agoWe 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.
- tolidano 7mo agoWhat’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.
- mapontosevenths 7mo agoI 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.
- linsomniac 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- erelong 7mo agoJust 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)
- PaulKeeble 7mo agoIts 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.
- CyLith 7mo agoPerhaps 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.
- toast0 7mo agoRefrigerated drawers in islands are definitely a thing in high end kitchens. But you typically have a large conventional fridge as well.
- wiskinator 7mo agoOhhh the links at the bottom of this guys site are wild and good reading. https://thiaoouba.com/ https://thiaoouba.com/ Please note I am disputing his science on the efficacy of a vertical fridge.
- tempestn 7mo agoI 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.
- Freak_NL 7mo agoThe 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.
- takenotice 7mo agoGlad someone else notice this! That was a wild rabbit hole I just went down and I only scratched the surface.
- doughecka 7mo agoReminds 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-and-bill-lishman-go-underground/article_f1961d9f-b338-580a-84fd-555be19bb053.html#:~:text=The%20refrigerator%20is,it%20stays%20cold.%E2%80%9D https://www.thestar.com/life/home-and-garden/paula-lishman-a...
- pierrec 7mo agoNow 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 https://youtu.be/RoGuvvzHY1A?t=416 That entire place is mind-bending.
- decimalenough 7mo agoMind-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?
- b112 7mo agoWell, 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.
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo agoWho, apart from Americans, puts eggs into the fridge?
- 7mo ago
- AndrewSwift 7mo agoDrawers would solve this in a vertical fridge.
- globular-toast 7mo agoProbably completely offset by having a home large enough to have a chest fridge.
- calmbonsai 7mo agoThis 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.
- Tepix 7mo agoThey are quite popular on sailboats.
- 0wis 7mo agoFor 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.
- Tepix 7mo agoIdea: 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.
- Freak_NL 7mo agoThe 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.
- bdbdbdb 7mo agoI 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
- kkralev 7mo ago[flagged]
- eternauta3k 7mo agoYou could just have a vertical fridge with "tub" drawers which individually contain the cold air.
- bdbdbdb 7mo agoAnd most fridges do, I have a veg "crisper" and a meat drawer, and two boxes for cheese and other things. I've read that if you can just minimise the amount of airflow in your fridge, even just by filling it with bottled water, it's more efficient as there's less air to fall out when you open the door. Boxes are essentially this
- slug 7mo agoThere'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 https://youtu.be/ydbsVS5rbSM?is=FVhiLHx4Uh94nb0k
- algolint 7mo ago[flagged]
- brunes 7mo agoThe answer to his question is right here.
- nkrisc 7mo agoSo 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.
- ajb 7mo agoThis 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.
- burnt-resistor 7mo agoMore 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).
- jon-wood 7mo agoFeel 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.
- incanus77 7mo agoThough 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.
- takenotice 7mo agoPractical 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.
- ranprieur 7mo agoI 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.