[mcfunk]

An interesting related question -- can refrigerator design help to address this issue? We have one of those side-by-side fridges with more shelf depth than shelf width. The design results in food getting pushed far back where it is easy to miss/forget food that is there and difficult to access food without causing an avalanche of containers. I often wonder if our (rented) home had a different style of refrigerator if we would deal with less forgotten/spoiled foods.

[glup]

It has always struck me as completely silly that fridges are seemingly designed so that their contents are maximally occluded. My solution has been to have 3 to 4 large plastic containers, Tupperware, etc., in the 1.5 - 3 gallon (~6-12 liters) range. Each gets a thematic selection of contents, e.g. one for leafy greens, one for "solid" veggies like peppers and cucumbers, and one for proteins (meat, cheese, tempeh). The advantages are:

- Every time you pull out the bin, you get a reminder about what you have, and what is going bad

- A meal is fairly easily structured by drawing one or more times from each bin

- It's much easier to clean a bin than to clean the whole fridge; you can move the contents into a new bin and clean the old one

- Food stays fresher because it's in airtight containers, and not subject to the horrid dry air of the fridge

- I know roughly how many person-days of food are in a bin —— so I can plan when to go to the store

- It's really easy to know what kind of food to buy more of when you go to the store —— bin closest to empty.

The one gotcha is that some bins can't be out of the fridge for long (e.g. meat), but generally the bins have sufficient thermal mass that 3-5 minutes on the counter inspection and choosing a few ingredients isn't going to cause any spoilage.

[roland35]

I bet you have less drippy leaks too! I always hated moving into an old apartment with a fridge with yellow goop inside!

[rdtwo]

Honestly I don’t think there is any innovation in the appliance space. The companies take the same components slap a new face plate on them or a led display and sell the same shit at different price points. In 2019 I’m still not sure that you can get a PID controlled oven or fridge and that should be trivially easy to implement.

[eurg]

Modern fridges have temperature sensors, per-drawer ventilated air-cooling, auto-detection of when particular high-thermal mass un-frozen food (i.e. a turkey) is added and start quick-freezing, and provide alarms when door or cooling fail. Also, energy efficiency for the EU A+++ rated units is really good.

And you get that already for the cheap units.

So, it's a freezer, it freezes, and it doesn't send a post to Facebook. The only complaint I would have is their loudness. Modern extra-slow compressors are often (perceived) louder than previous-gen units.

Also: given that even DIY ovens usually start with "get a cheap PID controller from e-bay", I doubt that commercial ones use anything else.

[rdtwo]

My fridge is modern but pretty simple. It’s really just a freezer with a vent that regulates fridge temps. It’s got some othe functions like defrost and seal warming but it’s a remarkably crude device

[qes]

Appliances, in my opinion, are a racket that artificially creates stratification among models to provide a variety of price points.

That said, very few refrigerators out of the large number of available models (many more than say dishwashers or clothes washer/dryers) have the same interior layout.

Even two nearby models from the same manufacturer with minor feature differences will have significantly different layouts, to the point that you can't just choose to get a fridge with or without feature X without also choosing between differences in the likely more important aspect of layout.

[logfromblammo]

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!

If I were one to build appliances, I would probably start by pumping liquid refrigerant through thermally-conductive shelves, and dispense entirely with blowing the cold air around. Air has almost no thermal mass. Water with a bit of ammonia dissolved in it is probably what is circulating through aluminum tubes.

Put the food to be chilled directly on the cold shelf, and the heat is removed by conduction, rather than convection.

Once we have that squared away, separate the portion of the appliance responsible for removing the heat from the portion responsible for storing the food. Stop selling the ugly awkward insulated cabinet attached the refrigerator. Now you have your standard back end, which does nothing but circulate fluid at a specific temperature through external hoses, and a customizable variety of front ends with standardized refrigeration hose fittings.

I'd want my insulated food storage cabinets to have evacuated double-paned glass windows in them, proximity-activated fluorescent tube lights, be relatively shallow for fridge shelves, and have pegboards on the back wall. I hate having to move front-food around to get to the back-food. It should all be front-food, which means shelves that are wide and not deep. One cannot do this with a monolithic appliance. One can easily do this with modular parts.

The deepest foods I ever want to store are large pizza boxes. Even those don't fill up the entire depth of a typical fridge.

[whenchamenia]

After switching to a counter-depth over a standard size, I must agree. I see nearly everything in the fridge, and its harder for things to get lost. The wider door was annoying at first, but now I would never go back.

[marssaxman]

The feature you want is called "counter depth" - I bought a new fridge just yesterday, and I chose this style. Its shelves are much wider than they are deep, so it's easy to see what's inside all at once. Its capacity is lower than the standard-sized fridge I used to have, but I'd rather store less stuff and use more of it.

[lifeformed]

The downside is that the larger door would mean the fridge would lose coldness a lot faster when opening the door. What if we had "chest fridges" like chest freezers, which preserve temperature very efficiently?

[pedrocr]

Creating a chest fridge from a freezer is actually trivial at least in simple chest freezer units. Just swap out the thermostat for a fridge one and everything works. The freezer thermostats just work on a different temperarure range but they're interchangeable.

I learned this when I was about to hack together a chest fridge with a PID controler and the appliance repair shop where I went to get parts gave me the XY problem question. Once I told them what I was doing they just did the thermostat replacement instead in no time.

[xyzzyz]

Losing coldness due to opening door is really not very relevant. Most of the cold in a fridge is stored in the items you keep in the fridge, not in the air itself. A typical fridge holds maybe 1 kg of air inside it, and cooling 1 kg of air by 17 Kelvings is 17 kJ, which is probably a minute of compressor running. Opening a fridge and losing all cold air from it thus costs you probably something like a quarter of a cent.

[Maximus9000]

> can refrigerator design help

or perhaps a software solution can help. Your fridge could recommend you eat certain things which are about to go mouldy.

[glup]

You can also use the neural net between your ears

[phonypc]

Haven't heard of this. Who sells them and for how much?

[jimktrains2]

As with most things, it's the input that's the problem. Just getting most people to scan what they take in and out and how much is used is problematic, not to mention entering what leftovers are and printing labels or something for them.

[city41]

I have found French door style refrigerators help. I especially like counter depth ones as they aren’t very deep.