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Good First Step to Energy-Efficient Fridge Design

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Here’s another way to cut the carbon costs of that biggest greenhouse gas emitter in your house – the fridge. The idea is to reduce the huge and unnecessary amount of energy  that just gets wasted when you open the door and all that cold air immediately dumps out.

Hot air rushes up into the fridge and when you close the door, the fridge now has warmer air inside that it sets to work cooling again. So the Shift Refrigerator would cut down on how much air can escape, so that less has to be replaced.

Working on the assumption that you really only use the same few items regularly, in this design you’d simply keep these in a mini-fridge inside the fridge, so that very much less cold air has to be replaced each time you open and shut that compartment door again.

While brilliant and simple, I actually think an even better idea would be to marry this concept to another breakthrough in fridge and freezer design, which is the top opening fridge.

You are probably familiar with this idea in convenience stores and 7-11s. Its where the ice-cream bars are kept. Because hot air rises, much more of the cold air stays down inside in a top opening freezer.

A lone handyman-inventor came up with a trial and measured its success, that I wrote about here. While his invention was ugly, the concept is useful and should be incorporated into future fridge design. Of course his adaptation was too deep for practical home use.

But marry top opening to this small slide-out compartment idea, and we are getting somewhere.

Designers should start looking at the idea of fridges in the form of slide-out top-opening trays under the counter-top, rather than trying to keep the old traditional standing rectangle shape. There are many sites, such as this one, that merely focus on repairing owners old appliances.

Take this compartment idea and redo it so that it can work lengthwise under the kitchen counter-top instead and slide out with top openings to the compartments, and you have a marriage made in heaven.

Designer: Yong-jin Kim
Source: Yanko Design
Image 7-11: Flikr user Freedryk