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Comment by doughecka | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Fly Away Home with the round fridge that would lift out of the counter. True story: "The refrigerator is round, rising from under the granite countertop with the touch of the button.

“The pneumatic fridge works with air compression,” she says. “You step on the button and it pops up and the racks spin like a lazy Susan. Cold air is heavy so it stays cold.”" https://www.thestar.com/life/home-and-garden/paula-lishman-a...

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Now that is the coolest fridge I've ever seen. Found a video of it in action (yes, featuring the same dad joke all over the comments but that is not stopping me): https://youtu.be/RoGuvvzHY1A?t=416

That entire place is mind-bending.

Mind-bending indeed, but looks pretty impractical. In an ordinary fridge, if your egg carton is a bit out of place, your door may not close properly. In this one, you're going to have liquid omelette slathered all over the place, and how do you even clean the bottom of that thing?

Well, it's a prototype. Any production model would need to watch for fingers too, so it'd have to be gentle.

Just as elevator doors won't crush a person due to sensors and such.

The cleaning part is an interesting question.

Who, apart from Americans, puts eggs into the fridge?

Any country where eggs are industrially washed before showing up in grocery stores.

Their protective coating (called the bloom, I believe?) goes away when that happens, and they become susceptible to salmonella when they stay at room temperature.

What's the reasoning behind washing eggs to make them more susceptible to salmonella?

Because it cleans the poop off.

So if an egg has poop on it, it's less likely to have salmonella?

There is a coating on the outside of the egg which prevents that.

Washing the egg removes the poo and the coating.

No source provided and this may just be some myth.

It's true. The bloom on the eggs protects them from whatever nastiness is on the outside.

This includes salmonella, which may be present if your flock is infected in the poop on the outside of the shell (remember hens only have one egress port), plus any other sources of environmental pathogens, of which there are many.

When the bloom is washed off the egg, pathogens have an easier time penetrating the shell and consuming the nutritious yummy bits inside. At room temperature, they can multiply rapidly. Refrigeration slows the rate of growth.

An unwashed egg retains the barrier, and stays fresh longer without refrigeration.

YMMV on household acceptance of dirty eggs on countertops, but they are cleaner than many other items within arms' reach that we are conditioned to not think about. :)

I happily keep eggs in the box on my kitchen worktop for maybe a couple of weeks without them going bad. They'll happily last longer, but the eggs won't be at their best.

Incidentally, I heard somewhere that using a ridge to crack eggs on (like the edge of a frying pan) isn't best as that can possibly drive a bit of poopy shell into the interior though if it's just about to be cooked and eaten then that's less problematic. I use the flat kitchen top to crack the shell instead which leads to the occasional amusing outcome of cracking it too hard and dumping the whole egg onto the worktop.

When we've had "too many" hens, we've had multiple large salad bowls full of eggs on the countertops. And that's after overwhelming our friends and neighbors.

They will easily last 4-6 weeks with no major degradation (i.e. still good for omelets, but use the freshest ones for poaching).

The forest predators eventually help moderate our egg surplus. Free range comes with risks, alas.

Interesting point about ridge-cracking. I'd never thought about it, but it makes sense and I will mend my ways! :)

Many British people and Australians, even though our eggs are sold at room temperature and unwashed. I don't know why, but for most of us it 'feels wrong' to store eggs anywhere else.

The idea is nice, but one thing I use a refrigerator for constantly is putting rectangular things in there. A box of cake, half of the lasagne left over in its oven dish, various containers, et cetera. Even cartons of milk and yoghurt have a square or oblong horizontal plane. Those round shelves are ideal for cilinders with a small diameter; bottles of condiment and beer, basically.

That's a very cool fridge. But how much difference does that make in practice?

Air doesn't have much mass, right? How much energy does it actually cost to cool the air in a fridge? (vs the solid parts of the fridge, and the food)

Looks like the OP's fridge uses 10-20x less power than a typical fridge, is that entirely due to the air not spilling out?

Mostly yes. Upright fridge and freezer designs trade off efficiency for convenience (rooting around in a chest fridge/freezer can be annoying). https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI

Depends a lot on humidity. Condensing a fridge full of humid air releases a fair bit of heat.

Also a fuller fridge will have much more thermal mass and care less.

But yes, exchanging the entire air volume of a fridge every time you open it is very energy-wasteful.

I was similarly reminded but couldn't recall the source. Thanks! It seems like it might be a worthy adaptation to commercial chest freezers/fridges.

Wouldn’t that just push the cold air into the room when it pops out.

Also, is that a big bottle of maple syrup the fridge?

The video down thread shows, the internal food-supports are all wire meshes with big gaps. The cold air is not squirted up and out like a syringe, it's more like the food is kept in a birdcage that's lowered and raised out of a pool of cold air.

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