A video about a silly little fridge that spiraled out of control

I'm pretty sure this is exactly how my apartment refrigerator worked. It never broke in my 11 years of residence. With the noise and mess of our new home and much more complicated unit, I sometimes long for those days. (edit:) I see now it had the evaporator/fan/freezer access.

Benjamin Rippel

So you inspired me to do the same to my mini fridge, but I don't know wtf I'm doing. I have a small idea, and I could figure it out if I could see how you have yours wired up. Is there any chance you could post a photo of your inkbird and where you have the wires running or maybe you could just post a reply as to what wires you have running where from the fridge to the inkbird and what terminals? It would be greatly appreciated! EDIT: From what I can tell it looks like I cut the red wire to the built in thermostat, and just tape that off. Then I need to run live to terminal 1, and neutral to terminal 2. Then connect live, neutral, and ground to the over-volt protector, and run the live from the overvolt to terminal 7, and the neutral & ground from the overvolt to terminal 8, but looking for some verification on this if possible. Thanks!

Alec, this would be the perfect application for a set of wireless bluetooth logging thermometers. The best are made by SensorPush at $50 each, the budget ones are made by Govee for $15. I sent an email to SensorPush saying they should send you a set, who knows if they will just put that email in the trash though.

I finally got to watch the video, but I haven't read all the comments here. I doubt that the thermostat was turning off the compressor, it's more likely that the compressor was running into a duty cycle limit.

David K

So weird to see this treated as an oddity - this is how my (plain white nonstylish) fridge works, and it's a normal fixture in smaller homes in my experience in the US.

Purple Coneflower

Please please PLEASE make a video on air fryers! What even are they? How do they work? There are dedicated air-frying machines, but then there are also toaster ovens that can air fry, but the only difference between these and the same convection only models seems to be the inclusion of a mesh basket? Do they actually compare well to oil fryers or is that all marketing and dieter coping? The people need answers!

BrandEver

Honestly I had to bail out of that one. There are just so many temperature charts I can look at before my brain goes to mush. I'm sorry.

You powered the fan on using a battery bank. Doesn’t the battery bank heat up while the fan is running? Doesn’t the changing fridge temperature cool down the battery bank on an oscillating basis as well? Doesn’t this heat source alter the convection patterns?

Well, in fairness, those new models are a good 25-40% larger, and automatic defrost is a thing most people expect. I would probably consider it worth that extra cost if you were using it as your primary refrigerator. But I agree that it's annoying they removed this option

Technology Connections

It's sad that instead of implementing a couple relatively simple fixes for this budget fridge, the company opted to just redesign completely and jack up the price. I'd love to see a video about the bizarre world of thermoelectric minifridges. I had one once and I understand why they're not more widely used... haha.

Joe Guasparini

This video just earned you a new Inventor Patreon (also because I got a raise at work). Well deserved (both of us)! Also because I was betting the strange cooling was due to a thermal sensor on the compressor that limited the duty cycle when it was running for a long time, and I was wrong. I also would've never guessed they were basically almost checking the temperature of the refridgerant line to deduce the temperature inside the compartment.

The Griffiths Family

That is my guess as well. You need to limit the duty cycle of the compressor and I can totally imagine how some engineer thought themselves pretty clever (rightfully so, I'd say) for finding a way of doing that with the same switch that you need *anyways*.

ascii158

Here's a thought about putting the thermostat near the cooling cool, maybe that was an intentional design decision. As you noted in your graphs, it prevented the run time of the compressor from running for more than a certain amount of time, even with huge heat load, thus preventing it from running too long, frying the compressor. One less component needed for the fridge :)

Benjamin Kier

"rediculous" 🤣

I guess what the original thermostat is really doing is controlling the amount of cooling being applied (as emphasised by higher numbers equating to more cooling). Following that logic, you would turn it up if you needed more cooling, such as when you introduce something warm, and turn it back down when back to temperature. While not ideal, it is probably a consequence of having a single circuit, and needing to make sure that the temperature in one compartment isn’t overly affected by what is being done to change the temperature in the other. A problem with your set-up will be that the freezer may be taken out of spec by what’s going on in the fridge - although the temperature drop that you caused in the freezer isn’t much of a problem, you might get a temperature increase in the freezer if you put something very cold in the fridge (like a large piece of meat moved from the freezer to defrost). A solution, I suppose, would be to have a thermostat in both compartments, together with an OR gate…

While I agree, I doubt the power pack was giving off that much heat, considering the minuscule load that it had with the fans, vs the typical things it might normally power.

Honorary Octopus

Your fan experiment is distorted by the heat created by lithium discharge. You need to wire them in from outside the box.

I'm surprised the self defrosting fridges don't use a refrigerant reversing valve instead of a heater. Our Samsung fridge (freezer on bottom) spends around 30 minutes in defrost running its heater based on monitoring it with a watt meter. A reversing valve would greatly reduce this defrost time. For example, I owned a refrigerant based dehumidifier that had a reversing valve, which only ran its defrost cycle for 2 to 3 minutes.

Seán Byrne

I've seen others design and work on commercial walk-ins. There's a 30,000 square foot, 2-story -55 C freezer building going up right now a few blocks from my home. The effort needed to plan and build things like that is amazing to me. Putting away a leftover casserole at room temp definitely has an impact on the operation of a freezer. Just imagine if it's pallets of food or vaccines coming off trucks.

Geemo

I can't get over how you call this a mini-fridge when it's on the larger side of normal fridges we have in Europe. I think we would also perceive that styling as typically American, although that may just be me.

RTT12

The way you lifted that fridge with no help... I'm scared.

By the end of the video I'd have expected installing a WiFi or Bluetooth-based temperature logger&controller (as a callback to the start of the video), or taping a tablet on its door, showing the temperature-logs.