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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

>This reminds me of smart refrigerators that can notify me when the door is ajar. I'd rather have it constructed so that it just closes automatically.

a world of liability is escaped by avoiding that feature add. This is similar to why self-closing doors/trunks/hatches took so long to catch on. It wasn't a technology problem, Cadillac and Rolls Royce showed this stuff in the 60s -- it was a liability gamble.

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"auto close" doesn't have to mean "unstoppably closed by hydralic press". Every fridge closes itself by simple and gentle gravity.

Not my fridge :( I'm renting an apartment and they installed some awful fridge where the doors don't close on their own. In fact, there's actually some resistance so that you have to push it with some effort to close it.

I've been living here for months and I still forget to close it half the time. But, at least it has a "helpful" feature that beeps at me (very quietly) if it's left open.

I bet it's still designed to and trying to, and simply failing to for any number of reasons.

It's fine if it tries but only weakly, and fails sometimes because of that.

One fridge failing every time is still just "sometimes" for the design.

Failing to chop off a babies head is an intentional part of the design, and it's still auto-close even when it fails to close because of an obstruction or improper installation or manufacturing defect or even because of a bad design that would never work well but was intended to.

There's no way any fridge is actually designed to stop before closing. That will be some assembly or desgn flaw like the seal rubs or something.

I had to hack my mother in laws fridge to prevent the door seals from interfering and preventing the doors from closing all the way. It worked fine when it was new, but after a short while the shitty design of the door to door seals, the seals hit and rub on each other and and after a while the seals started to pull out to where they then interfered. The door was still designed to close itself, and tried to, just another part of the design sabotaged that intention.

It's such a weak force normally that it's easy interfere with. A hinge installed slightly off will look fine and work fine, but the seal on the hinge side maybe rubs just a bit, and that's enough to spoil it. Or a nick in a teflon washer acting as a bearing, producing a detent resting spot. Could be anything but there is no way it's in the drawings and designed to do that.

have you tried cleaning the hinge and applying some oil formulated for metal?

Yeah my new fridge also has this for some reason. There is a sort of detent at the quarter open positon and it won't go past that on its own. You have to push it past that point to close it. And it will beep if you leave it open for a few minutes. Absolutely baffling design.

This is exactly the case for me. People suggested oiling the hinge or something but from examining the mechanism, it just appears to be designed this way. No idea why.

> a world of liability is escaped by avoiding that feature add

Huh? There are no refrigerators that don't have that feature.

“That feature add” referred to auto-closure, I’d imagine.

> “That feature add” referred to auto-closure, I’d imagine.

Yes, of course; what do you think the alternative was? There are no refrigerators that don't have that feature.

Based on my experience, that statement is not only wrong, but obviously so. Because of that, I assumed it was not what you meant.

You should try using a fridge sometime.

Every refrigerator I have used does this with gravity.

Perhaps a regional specificity? Personally I've never seen such an auto-closing fridge in France.

It’s nothing special. The fridge is just leveled so the hinge is slightly higher on both sides. The door then naturally swings closed. Do French refrigerators have some kind of mechanism that would prevent this? Like a latch of some kind?

We just have them perfectly level, so the door does not move at all on its own.

Weird. Why?

I don't know. When I google this question in French, I see people whose fridge door does close on its own, asking for how to solve this issue; so they must find it inconvenient.

You are not insane, I have also never seen any fridge that auto closes (I'm from central Europe).

Kind of. My home refrigerator does this and it just works. The one at work regular gets hung up nearly shut. There's a local minimum in the almost closed state. It only has enough momentum to close if builds up enough speed.

The ideal refrigerator should self close from any angle of open-ness. This is definitely not the case in general today.

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