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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=freezer+fridge+conversion

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002EAL58

show us your 'creative' system so you don' have to remove what is on top to get what's below in a chest freezer.

Unless you buy low end chest freezers you get 1 or two layers of sliding shelves. To access lower items, you slide the shelves to the side.

If you were not blessed with sliding shelves, people typically uses bins or dividers

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.

Perhaps one can have two sliding shelves of size (N-1)/2 for even greater flexibility.

If you cared a lot about power efficiency, couldn't you simply use a hand-crank for a vertical carousel shelving system?

I personally just pack things at the bottom I don’t use often.

I personally pack things at the bottom and throw them out when I find them years later :(

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.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift

That way it all stays in the chest

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.

what sort of pull-up shelves did you install?

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.

People pay for those???

What do you do, steal one from the grocery store every time you buy milk?

Everyone that I know has borrowed one from the back of a national/international cafe chain.

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.

There are "spring loaded shelf raisers" (this is one but sideways https://www.amazon.com/Rev-Shelf-RAS-ML-HDCR-Height-Cabinet/...)

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.

Something like this would be hilarious but probably work fine: https://www.amazon.com/Electric-Hydraulic-110V-240V-Platform...

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.

> and you have to take everything out to access the bottom most area.

And an ice pick, if you live anywhere even slightly humid.

This is a fridge, not a freezer. PS: if you're buying a freezer to convert, pick one without a defrost cycle.

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.

How is this different from a regular fridge?

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.

Gravity pulls the hot air down into the bottom freezer

Time to read up on that...

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.

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.

Household fridges/freezers are really hampered by the built-in compressor.

Much could be saved by using remote compressors but that cost is much higher and usually associated with commercial units.

Especially if you’re in a hot climate.

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)

Linus actually did this experiment with water cooling PCs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8bLtg9J1Oc

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.

Source: https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI

> actually significantly less efficient

It's less energy efficient. It's significantly more time efficient and ergonomic.

I've seen fridges like this before. I think it's more expensive?

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.

It depends how often it's opened.

> unless you spend a lot of time at dock or have a big generator.

Even full size residential fridges can be powered by the smallest portable generator.

RVers regularly power full size residential fridges with nothing but solar panels.

> 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).

I’d imagine on a boat the feature that things can’t fall out would be a nice advantage for a chest.

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?"

Working with bacteria, I absolutely hate our -80C chest freezers because of the idea of falling in.

I wonder if a long shallow chest fridge on a shelf is more efficient

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