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Comment by refactor_master | Hacker News Reader

Most people in dense urban areas would actually pay less. By going vertical you’re freezing a whole m2 that was otherwise necessarily occupied by the fridge. In most places, 300 kWh is much cheaper than an extra irrevocable m2 for your fridge.

Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge.

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I put things on top of my vertical fridge all the time. Also, how do you access a chest fridge with items sitting on top of lid?

You can't. A chest fridge/freezer becomes a gravitational singularity sucking random items from every corner of the kitchen to its lid. You can keep trying to return them to their rightful place but in the end it is a fruitless task as the rate of accumulation becomes faster than your speed of repatriation and the contents of the freezer are eventually lost to time behind the "event horizon" of its surface.

source: my lost ice pops

This happens in our vertical one.

I need you to describe the pitfalls of doing the laundry in your Pratchett style!

I literally don't understand this comment at all. What point are you trying to make?

They seem to have mixed up horizontal and vertical, and if they did, then my reading is that they're saying the cost of the extra floor space (and the loss of the "shelf" space on top of the fridge) when using a chest fridge makes the economics unfavourable for people in dense urban areas, even with the energy savings.

At least, I'm hoping that's what they meant. If they really meant horizontal and vertical in the way they used it then I've got no idea either.

Yeah, I understand your first sentence, but the last part of their comment was

"Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge."

Don't they mean a horizontal fridge is a chest fridge? Which would make it sound like they want their whole comment to be in support of a chest fridge? Which is why none of it makes any sense to me.

That's what makes me think they've simply mixed up horizontal and vertical, because you can't (conveniently) store things on top of a chest fridge, but you can store things on top of a vertical fridge. Basically I think they've got a coherent point if you swap vertical and horizontal throughout their whole comment.

I'm also wondering if "freezing" was meant to be "freeing".

Vertical = a fridge that opens around a vertical axis and ditto for horizontal.

I didn't get it until reading your comment, but I think perhaps they meant 'vertical' as in 'it opens vertically' (chest freezer)—i.e. they didn't mix them up exactly, just used them differently than we expected.

Did you by any chance switch "vertical" and "horizontal" at every point in your comment?

The words are intrinsically ambiguous. A standard fridge opens horizontally but stands vertically. Is it vertical or horizontal?

Horizontal vs vertical is determined by the orientation of the object's longest dimension. Portrait pictures on a wall and fridges with doors that open out are vertical, landscape pictures on a wall and chest freezers are horizontal.

I have cabinets over my vertical fridge that has things put in it. There's only like a 15 cm gap between for airflow. How do you slap a cabinet on top of a horizontal fridge?

But if I put things on top of it, now I can't get at the food.

I mean, I have one of these as a meat freezer, and sometimes I put things on top of it, and then my wife gets mad at me and moves that thing somewhere because otherwise nobody can open it.

Things on top of my vertical fridge on the other hand (my cat for example), can stay there indefinitely.

Wouldn't a solution be to have the opening on the side and pull it toward you, like a "box on wheels"? As long as the sides of the "box" are thermally insulated, it seems like a sound solution for the stated problem (but certainly not one that's mechanically the cheapest/simplest).

A friend suggested a bottom-hinged door like that on a garbage chute, though well sealed, and as wide as the fridge, so the sides of the door don't get in the way of storing long objects in the fridge.

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