Chest freezers! No, really

my wife's wine fridge has an a/c compressor but also some resistive heat strips to keep the temp up. some people put their wine fridges in unheated basements or garages so it's not a crazy feature. so it could have been something like that, or the shipping container might have enough thermal mass and insulation that it's retaining warmth over multiple days.

nobody

This video has mostly made me think about something I saw in Korea a couple of years ago. We were in a bar which had a temperature-controlled shipping container outside as a beer store. The thermostat on the side said it was 4°C inside the container. The outside temperature was -20°C. Where was it getting the heat from?

Martin Deutsch

2:21 I have a question all that 100W of electrical energy: what is the unit of power? (Crap, that pun works better when it isn’t written down!)

Gavin Rea-Davies

I am loving the video so far (but it's no surprise, I challenge you to make one single video on the most boring topic you could think of and have me not loving it to death. Brown? Monorails? Elevator sounds? Loved them all and this is no less). My only concern is that... you aren't in focus? Looks like the focus plane is 20-30cm in front of you. Or is it me? Oh well.

:: singing :: how much is the Imac In the window, the one with the translucent case; how much is the Imac in the window...:: (no I don’t want to buy it, that song just came to mind when I saw it.)

James Jepsen

The Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things!!! That's a deep cut

Asaf Sagi

🎵That might be a great t-shirt 🎵 That might be a great t-shirt 🎵...

Big Car

I noticed your toaster.

Robert McCullough

Jack's pizza 👍

PiraTed

I approve of this comment wholeheartedly.

Technology Connections

to one of your small asides yes in the french door fridges there is a separate ice maker in the door, as in *inside the fridge* and repair guys I've talked to have told me they are a major point of failure for those models, aside from energy efficiency concerns

mike quick

Thanks for spotting that!

Technology Connections

To answer some of your questions/ponderings: The french door style fridges with ice dispensers in the door accomplish this in one of two different ways. 1. They have a whole ice maker and bin in the door. These typically are of a smaller cube count to be smaller. They get cold air from the freezer through ducting through the side wall of the unit and have an opening on the side wall with a gasket to get into the door. 2. The door just contains the ice bin. The ice maker is in a separated compartment in the refrigerator compartment in the upper left and it will drop the ice into a hole in the door to get into the ice bin. The ice maker is cooled by either ducting from the freezer compartment or by a secondary evaporator line that runs to that ice maker compartment and runs beneath the tray of the ice maker. Top mount fridges (freezer on top) are more efficient as you assumed because of the tendency of heat to move. The damper assembly to allow air to flow to the fridge compartment can be simpler and more efficient because the colder air can move quicker because of its natural tendency. Bottom mount fridges have to have a more complicated damper assembly that normally consists of a fan to force the colder air up. They don't have to have a fan but otherwise the less efficient flow can lead to the compressor having to run for longer. I hope this info is useful to you!

Casey Blackburn

I can tell you with my grandma's french door fridge/freezer that looked like the one you showed, her ice maker is in the door. It stores ice in a bucket attached to the left fridge door. Also, I was surprised cleaning out my dehumidifier and finding it had a condenser too.

Jason Wellband

Alec I think you have a typo in your title. You wrote "What they tells us"

blalo'u

Cool. Keeping things fresh.

Per Hedetun

I heartily recommend a FLIR One or similar for your next refrigeration related video.

nobody

One interesting thought about upright freezers in the basement. I go to mine maybe a couple times a month. So, it spends most of its time closed and not spilling out the air, unlike the one in the kitchen built into the fridge that gets opened all the time for nuggets or ice cream.

DromeMeOut

0:39 you're keeping computers in a window well?

Brian Miller

The larger chest freezers are great for storing bodies

Dude, you crack me up. Thanks!

B3

Channeling Bill Hammack at 5 minutes there.

Ben Jones

Fantastic video. You should cover vacuums (like carpet cleaners) next. Or maybe HEPA filtration,

Richard Stifle

Another thing to note about chest freezers: because they are hidden away in the basement (and maybe partially because of the power efficiency) they tend to have a very long lifetime. A fridge is often replaced with a kitchen remodeling, when the house changes owners, or to get new features or design. The freezer in the basement stays til it dies, sometimes trough several owners who don't want to drag it up the stairs when they move. Less cycles probably also help longevity Mine is from the 80's and still works great... I hooked mine to a kill-a-watt and did the math a couple of years ago (can't remember the numbers other than it was about 3$ a month to run), and found the power savings of getting a new one would never pay off... Great video as always!

Thor Syvertsen

I'm stealing "Food Netflix" kthxbye

I have some experience with -80°C (should be... about -112°F) ultrafreezers in the Lab. Most of them are for the sake of efficiency chest freezers. We use them with a pair of thermal gloves, and special "stacks" of boxes (we called them "towers") that you could pull out. Usually worked pretty well, and, indeed because of the design, you could leave it open relatively long, to pull out your stack, get the box you wanted, get from the box the tube you needed and put everything back in. The only problem: if you lost a tube inside... The freezer was always foggy, and of course, cold inside... Then I came once in a lab where they had a front door ultra freezer: always troublesome when opening, lots of snow buildup at places you didn't want... The people there told me that they really wanted the chest-freezer!

MrHammond

Hmm...as well as being an informative video about chest freezers, could this be a parable about something else that's going on the world? Or am I reading too much into this?

Matthew Lawrenson

The visual gag has been removed ;)

Technology Connections

I think there are two reasons for the drawers. Accessibility and the mechanics of the fridge. The stacking drawers these have (my fridge here at HQ is one of these) are quite handy because nothing gets buried, and it brings the food out to you so you don't need to get on your knees to reach things in the back. Related to the mechanics, usually the compressor and other components are at the bottom rear of the fridge, which creates a sort of hump. With the drawers, the bottom draw is narrower, and the top drawer fits over the hump. In the same vein, if the entire bottom were to pull out like a chest freezer, I think it would present difficulties with thermal design - I don't think you'd want the evaporator to move with it, as that would require flexible refrigerant hoses that would be failure-prone - so you'd need a sort of forced air convection system to blow air past the evaporator and into and around the tub. And honestly I don't know if that would really allow for energy savings.

Technology Connections

Also, if your studio ever catches fire, the responding fireman will hate what you did to the window well...

Mike Bird

Please correct me where I'm wrong, but one of the things I despise about the bottom drawer style freeser is that there are no internal sides to that drawer unless you get a "prosumer" brand like Wolfgang Puke, er, Puck. If there were internal sides, so it was a REAL drawer and not a basket on slides, even if it wasn't thickly insulated, it would keep the already cold air from spilling out when it's opened. So it would be more like a chest freezer. Why they have these incredibly stupid drawers I can only believe is due to "optimizing" it for the "desirable" total cubage figure. So, it's the fault of us nerds who obsessively compare listed figures rather than looking at the overall design. Sigh.

Mike Bird

hell yes a nearly 30 minute long TC video on refrigeration, this is all i ever wanted