Chest Freezers; What they tell us about designing for X

OK, comment-pinning time! I want to address the whole full-vs-empty fridge aside because I appear to have understood this differently than many people and it illustrates a problem in the video. Lots of people are saying things along the lines of "I thought the point of a full fridge was to minimize the amount of air inside so opening it causes less heat loss." Similar to the whole thermal mass reasoning (which is where I was coming from), this doesn't really matter in the long run. Which of course runs counter to the idea that chest freezers are helped by the fact they have a lid and not a door. So let's talk about that. The thermal mass of air is tiny compared to any solid or liquid substance. So even if you exchange the entire volume of air in the fridge or freezer when you open it, once it's shut the new air will rapidly cool thanks to the cold walls, shelves, and of course food. That's why the freezer door gets sucked in. This does introduce some quantity of heat, yes, and in theory if you had more stuff in the fridge less heat would be introduced. But honestly I think this quantity of heat is mostly negligible, and I regret not making that clear in the script. I think that the heat introduced from opening the doors a few times is minimal compared to an entire day's worth of natural heat intrusion. Chest freezers do get some help from the fact that they're sort of "never opened" but I think that more important than even that is simply their massive amounts of insulation compared to a refrigerator. I actually talked more in depth about this in a follow-up video, which you can find here; https://youtu.be/CRBWPbqvqvw (edited to add;) Having thought through it some more, I imagine the greatest benefit of having the lid on the top is that the cold air isn't being held back by a thin door seal as it is in an upright freezer. I really should get a thermal camera!

This channel is basically "in depth facts about mundane things I thought I didn't care about but actually do because it's surprisingly interesting". I'm glad I have this channel while in lockdown.

It's funny because in France, a "french door" fridge is called an "american fridge".

A good organization trick for chest freezers is to use reusable fabric shopping bags of varying colors to organize your food into the bags. Keep a key to what is in each bag taped to the top of the freezer.

This video was, without exaggeration, the final straw in buying a chest freezer myself, and I've been most happy with it since.

As a PhD in engineering, who took many (too many) thermodynamics classes, i think you're better at teaching the basics of thermo than most of my professors.

Hey, uh, so apologies to all of you who use Celsius (as you should) but since we're talking about refrigerators and freezers, well hopefully you know about what those temperatures should be.

Between my house's dishwasher that only takes those packets and our fancy-ass, French-door + pullout freezer, this channel is exposing all the inefficiency in my kitchen that i'd never before questioned. Thanks, Tech Connect!

I've had an upright freezer and a chest freezer—personally I prefer digging down to the bottom of a box rather than to the back of one, as things are less likely to fall out on the floor. Gloves are a good idea either way.

"put the cans in the cooler and... Close the lid" I sense some latent irritation that too many people like to leave the lid open

my takeaway is that we should start making efficient ovens that are stuck on the ceiling and open from the bottom.

When I started watching this video, I never imagined I'd see footage of someone using a leaf blower to blast warm air into a chest freezer. This channel never ceases to amaze me.

Thank you so much for this! I am a very cheap bastard. I have lived my entire adult life in China, most of my friends growing up in very poor areas. My 20 years here have taught me to calculate the cost of appliances. Something that majority of the people don't think about here. I'm planning on moving back to Canada soon and your video has given me hope, that I can continue to be a cheap bastard and still live a normal life. I love all your videos and your humour is exceptional.

"If you have a leafblower and a chest freezer" sounds like the ravings of a madman and i love it.

"There's a sweet spot to be found" Oh, I know where this is going... 45 degree angle freezers!

I'm a refrigeration engineer, and I do a lot of thermal FEA simulation for heat gain and external condensation performance. For the bit where you were speaking of different configurations having similar internal volume, but different energy consumption values. There are some reasons such as the machine compartment, which can be 10°F greater than the ambient air, being directly adjacent to the freezer compartment on a bottom freezer. Also, the evaporator fan also has a more difficult time forcing air into a fresh food compartment above, rather than forcing air downward as in a top freezer. These are impactful, and certainly design considerations are made with this knowledge, but by far the largest factor is the DOE energy standard. Energy requirements are not just a simple formula for how much energy usage per unit internal volume across the board. The value for allowable energy per internal volume differs based on the compartment type (freezer vs. fresh food) as well as configuration (top freezer, bottom freezer, side by side, etc.). As you noticed, the allowable energy consumption per DOE is less for a top freezer as compared to a bottom freezer. Most refrigerators are designed to an energy standard, be that DOE standard energy or energy star, then internal volume is optimized to meet that standard.

One of the things I found to help with “things stacked on top of things” is having a smaller variety of items in the chest freezer and more variety in the upright fridge/freezer. I find that if I have 5 or 10 of each item, I’m not digging for them as often.

"But on the other hand..." Content of this quality simply isn't available on TV. I love this channel.

By this logic, ovens should also be chests, but mounted on the ceiling

Off gridders have been using chest freezers + a thermal switch to convert chest freezers into refrigerators for years. Just put the thermal sensor inside the freezer, turn the freezer on high, plug it into the thermal switch, and set the thermal switch to the temp you want. The freezer is always calling for more cold, but the thermal switch doesn't give it power till the temp rises above the temp you set.