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Comment by tbran | Hacker News Reader

But while you might be optimizing for convenience, this is optimizing for energy conservation. Seems like a great opportunity to be creative with an organization system.

I would bet that most people that are doing this conversion (and there are many, this idea has been around for years [0]) are already doing weird stuff for off-grid living, so turning a freezer into a fridge isn't a big deal - the inconveniences are just different.

The article does not mention that a thermostat coupled to a mechanical switch [1] is typically used to regulate the temperature.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=freezer+fridge+conversion

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002EAL58

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show us your 'creative' system so you don' have to remove what is on top to get what's below in a chest freezer.

Come on! You're on hacker news and this snark is the best you can come up with?

I challenge you to do better.

How about:

- shelves that raise vertically - shelves that swing up and out to the sides or front (bet gas shocks could work for easily moving shelves) - preplanning so that your meal ingredients for the week are on top

As with many things, you can change your surroundings or change your behavior.

Right?! I was thinking the same thing. Some kind of pull up gantry that lets you access everything. Or how about a vertical carousel? Like a paternoster on its side?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift

That way it all stays in the chest

Unless you buy low end chest freezers you get 1 or two layers of sliding shelves. To access lower items, you slide the shelves to the side.

If you were not blessed with sliding shelves, people typically uses bins or dividers

You can't slide a shelf unless there's space to slide; which is space that you can't then use for storage. Unless there's some kind of chest freezer I don't know about that has spring-loaded vertical sliding shelves or something.

Agreed. If there is room for N baskets on your rails you put N-1 baskets in each layer except the bottom where you can use N.

In practice you keep “the gap” over the part of the floor with the greatest cooling capacity and put your quick turnover “inserted warm” items on the bottom layer there. They cool fastest and are easy to get to.

Perhaps one can have two sliding shelves of size (N-1)/2 for even greater flexibility.

If you cared a lot about power efficiency, couldn't you simply use a hand-crank for a vertical carousel shelving system?

Show me the creative system so you don't have to remove what's in at the front of a vertical fridge shelf to get to 2013 vintage jar of mayonnaise at the back.

If everything was on shelves that rose out of the fridge on open, you could conceivably get 3-sided/~270° access to items on all levels.

That's kinda what big door shelves are accomplishing in upright fridges, of course, and I have no idea how robust a riser mechanism would be over time, so I'm not sure how much better that is.

I personally just pack things at the bottom I don’t use often.

I personally pack things at the bottom and throw them out when I find them years later :(

You might not quite be optimizing for energy conservation if you have to live in a big, fully detached house for stuff like this, and commute to the city.

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