Wait is this actually better? It's well presented in the ad but:
- that removable veggie holder in the door looks crazy heavy and super awkward to put back in place (lining up at a sharp angle while gripping likely slick sides)
- you have to open the refrigerator door to get at the freezer
- the door compartments are narrow and probably can't handle odd sized containers
- the shelves have holes in them so anything that drips off that uncovered plate of food gets all over everything below it
- the ice ejector is completely unnecessary in our current world of ice makers. I doubt that fridge has a water line coming into it
- the shelves don't look like they have adjustable height so you're stuck with 3 shelves that can't fit a gallon of milk
Yeah the only two features that this fridge has that my fridge doesn't have are the pull out shelves and the removable bin for vegetables.
I've got no idea why you'd really want the removable bin for vegetables. Carry all my veggies over to the sink first and then pick out the ones I want? And look at how small that thing is.
Pull out shelves seem nice I guess, but they'd only be useful on lower shelves. My fridge seems to be about a foot taller than the one in the video. This person wouldn't be tall enough to see all the stuff on the top shelf if it were pulled out.
Does your fridge not have crisper bins for veggies? I've had that in pretty much all my fridges, and the bins are always easily removable.
Pull-out shelves not so much (all the fridges I've had, had adjustable but "locked" glass shelving, I would assume for hygiene as a glass shelf is much easier to clean regularly or after a spill, plus they don't block light so much), but they are available on expensive or professional fridges.
The pull out fridge doesn't even seem that great, I just think of shit sliding off the back or you push them in and then you push everything off the front.
> I've got no idea why you'd really want the removable bin for vegetables.
They say in the video that it's for when you bring a bunch of fresh vegetables home. You put the bin next to the sink and then load the vegetables into the bin as you wash them.
Agree. It gives that "nifty!" impression, but I don't think it would be so useful in practise. Especially, I don't think the vegetables would keep well in that box. When I replaced my older (90s) fridge, vegetables kept much better in the new one, which had ciculation of air that the older fridge missed, and thus better humidity control. I suspect that tight box would not be good for durability of freshness.
- you have to open the refrigerator door to get at the freezer
Not to mention that this freezer is likely:
1. Not self-defrosting, and likely to build up ice since you open the door each time you open the fridge.
2. Definitely less convenient. I have a fairly cheap, small refrigerator - one that fits in my attic apartment - and the freezer has pull-out drawers. Since it sits under the fridge, this is usually nice.
The hinged box in the door will live till it gets left drop-open. Then it will break the hinges, stop points (and I fear it will require the entire door replaced), and give foot injure.
Sliding shelves -- I see stuff sticking to the upper shelf and falling behind onto the lower one, making it impossible to draw this one back and close the fridge. (Occasionally you have to stuff things in plastic bags onto each other, because of lack of space, and they push onto the upper shelf; or sometimes bags get pushed to the back wall and freeze to it -- and it's no problem on still shelves.)
This reminds me of cellphone Sony J70, with a scrolling wheel. I wanted one badly in 2002, bought one -- and turned out it wasn't much more convenient (the wheel wasn't smooth) and it broke the very first time I dropped the phone on the floor. Repair was costy. That's how I learned that seemingly cool features have downsides to them.
I was able to find a print ad for this thing[0], and it has 9.5 cubic feet of storage. Modern "full size" fridges have 2-3x as much storage (20-30 Cubic feet!), are going to be vastly cheaper to run/use, and have built in ice and water makers.
And you get can similar sized, simple fridges (that are still probably vastly cheaper) for like the same price as that one, but minimum wage is like 8x higher today.
> the shelves have holes in them so anything that drips off that uncovered plate of food gets all over everything below it
My childhood fridge had wire shelves. The most common problem was when mom's sourdough starter would get frisky and blow the lid off its plastic container, spreading starter goo to all sorts of things. Seemed to happen at least once a year.
My girlfriend's mom has a teaching oven (used in home economics classes) from the 1950s. The 'teaching' part mostly means it has a more accurate and detailed temperature gauge.
This gas oven is so heavy that light in the kitchen gravitationally lenses around it, but it's still going strong and the best oven I ever used.
They used a shielded bimetalic thermostat to measure the radiant heat coming from the toast surface, instead of a timer, to establish doneness (consistently toasting despite heating element variance) and implemented the mechanical lowering & raising of toast without a single motor (which is why 60+ year old examples still work).
I've lived with two of these (at home growing up, and later via a roommate) and I hated both of them.
The toast slot is too narrow. You can't heat a bagel - well, technically you can force it in there, but it won't come back out with some help from a utensil.
They get flakey and you end up bouncing the toast a dozen times to get it to lower. Yes, I know there's an adjustment, but it's finicky and annoying. It's a toaster for crying out loud.
Yes, the design is ingenious, but there's a good reason they aren't made anymore.
α = 4GM/((c^2)b), where b is the impact parameter[0].
Apparently human visual acuity is 0.3 milli-radians, so if b = 1 meter, that's approximately "the moon" (in at most a 1 meter radius volume)…
…assuming I didn't mix up my units in this formula I never used before, though it feels about right given the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth is ~ centimetres.
[0] never heard of this before just now; I think it's the shortest distance between the central point and the path the light would have taken if it hadn't been deflected?
toward the mass M at a distance r from the affected radiation, where G is the universal constant of gravitation and c is the speed of light in vacuum.
[0]
The best resolution our eyes can offer is about one arcminute (1/21600 of a turn). Depending on your distance from the object, just plug in some numbers.
Say at the earth-moon distance 384400 km the object must be about 24x the mass of the sun to bend the incoming light at one arcminute (~0,0002909rad).
The sun actually bends light at about 2 arcseconds as seen from Earth; the focal point would be about 542x the distance Sun-Earth. [1]
Alternatively the object of say 1m^3 volume at a distance of 10 meters will bend light by 1 arcminute if it weighs 3.27x10^16 kg, the density of about 1/10th of a neutron star.
To conclude: one will be instantly overwhelmed by the gravitational forces before being able to see an object bend light with one own eyes. That's why this kind of extreme bending/lending is reserved for galaxy clusters.
70 years ago a fridge would cost $250-$400 - about a months salary, that's about $4k in todays money. If you pay $4k for a fridge instead of $400 today you can get one with a fair amount of gadgets too.
But that's the thing. We don't want today's gadgets. We don't need internet connected fridges, apps and other breakable IoTs. We just want more usable fridges.
The higher end of refrigerators don't have today's gadgets. The wolf zub-zero ones are 10k+ and are the most boring, efficient, and durable things I've seen.
I can quickly go out and buy a fridge that is far cheaper than a month's salary, and that has the same effective features. I was honestly waiting for the feature that I couldn't do on a normal, non-internet-connected fridge these days.
So, really I don't understand what this post is referencing. The fridges from today are vastly better than that thing, especially when you consider things like temperature control, power usage, space, and usability.
Can you buy worse fridges? Sure. You can spend substantially less and get something more barebones.
Then spend a grand or two on a decent fridge from a reputable manufacturer that will last and has the features/gadgets you probably do want (auto defrost, quick freeze, chilled water etc).
I have also wondered if internet-connected fridges use more electricity. Having a computer and touchscreen and wifi collecting data 24/7 and sending it to samsung can't be cheap power-wise.
That looks right. Here's the start of the fridge section in the 1950 Sears spring/summer catalog to give an idea of what it was like then [1]. Here's the start of the freezer section [2].
A lot of those features are available in today's fridges. Also, they use less power today. And you really don't have to get one with wifi and a touchscreen.
A lot of those features also seem quite debatable.
- The big pile of fruits and veggies is a good way to pressure-bruise them, and also to trap ethylene, and you can usually get the crisper drawers out so not sure I see the difference.
- Special compartments for butter and cheese are a completely unnecessary lack of flexibility.
- Metal roll-out trays / drawers exist in high-end fridges, there are also drawer fridges and freezers for some use cases (mostly compact kitchens / appartments where you don't have the space for swing doors).
- The ice cube thing seems like a complete mis-feature, there are 4 ice cube trays integrated which seems fine, why would you move those to a bucket of ice cubes losing 1/3rd the freezer space and congealing the cubes together? If you regularly need industrial quantities of ice cubes, getting a quarter-size (100L) chest freezer seems like a better idea. Or an upright if you have a lot of frozen stuff which you need regular access to (or you don't have a cellar to put a half or full-size chest in).
* why would you move those to a bucket of ice cubes losing 1/3rd the freezer space and congealing the cubes together? *
I use a portion of my freezer space for ice cubes. I make a batch of ice in the ice machine, and then freeze it until it gets low and/or used. My fridge doesn't have an ice machine and this uses less freezer space than ice cube trays.
I use the ice to make delicious alcoholic drinks, and would happily make more ice than I ever though I'd need just to avoid having to make it when inconvenient.
My fridge came with a 3rd drawer in the middle for veggies or fruit. It has pouches that absorb ethylene gas and works very well. You have to replace them every few months but they aren’t too expensive on Amazon. You can buy a plastic stick on piece and install it in on an older fridge.
The drawer is in the middle above the freezer in a French style fridge. You can set the temp to things like fruit, meat, or cheese but we prefer a dedicated produce area.
Yeah but I'd bet the one we see in the video is probably still working, while I'm on my third fridge in 20 years. I think that negates any energy efficiency gains
Remember when looking at old technology that still works Survivorship Bias is a thing to be aware of. Yes, that elderly family member with the 1950’s fridge makes us jealous. But how many of their friends who bought that same fridge had to upgrade because theirs crapped out?
Why doesn't everyone have old fridges then? You only buy new when the old one breaks down right? But if the old ones were so sturdy why were they all replaced?
I expect there's some survivorship bias at play here.
I’ve had 8 fridges in 22 years, up until my latest I’ve they were all from this supposedly better age. All failed, in some cases disastrously.
The only one that’s survived longer than a few years for me? The new one. Going 6 years strong.
Not everything on my new one is perfect—I managed to break the built in water jug—but I feel a lot of the replies here need to take into account survivorship bias.
I have a old basic GE fridge with a mfg date of 2008. It's still going strong and I hate myself for fixing it because it's fucking miserable having to bend down to the fridge as a tall person LOL. (I really want a bottom freezer fridge, single or french door) In the last month I have dropped probably 5 glass items and shattered them because I'll hit my hand on something trying to put things in or out of the fridge.
I am getting a Sub-zero in a few weeks which is damn near the most expensive fridge. It does not have nice pull out shelves or the veggie compartments.
I expect the sealing and ethylene scrubbing will keep veggies fresh linger.
Why does everyone keep their veggies in the fridge, do you buy them in bulk? Basic veggies like onions, tomatoes, cucumber I eat fast enough to just keep on shelves and in regular rotation, and all more special plants are anyway bought for a certain meal in mind so they're used within a day or two.
My fridge does have a veggie section but I use that for beer.
this is true but the build quality of the appliances today are unquestionably worse, I as a side job in my youth did a lot of appliance maint/repair. And now working on my modern high end appliances it just makes me sad. plastic gearing, metal housing with so little ferrous metal magnets have trouble sticking to them. compressors made of such thin material its a wonder they ever survive the pressure they are under for 10 years.
Washing machines whose outer clading is the only thing that holds it together, so they strongly flex as they run, wearing the barrings and belts out.
the water sensing tech that is required by law is built with so many easy to fail parts that it probably has caused more waste than has ever saved water.
My fridge has equivalent to most of those features. It doesn’t have an ice ejector but it does make its own ice. the only feature mine doesn’t have is the box for chopped vegetables. I don’t think I would use that anyway.
You could get a clear plastic shallow bin with relevant dimensions to fit on a shelf in your fridge. Then you can take it out and put it back as needed. I just use the vegetable drawer in my fridge though.
And how much power did it consume? What were the materials used for those fridges and paint? How much did they weight? How stable was the temperature in the freezer and refrigerator? Did those fridges had any mechanism to avoid frost formations? How much did they cost?
Point is, the needs of a fridge barely changed in 70 years, the only real expectation we had was that they would become cheaper to buy and run and easier to operate and maintain, all things modern fridges achieved to do.
I would also argue that the ice cube breaker is a non-feature and that shelves being so easily removable is a minus rather than a pro. The ones on the door would easily break and the other ones could be easily pulled (sending every other thing on that shelf on the floor) if something got stuck.
The door shelves also having all of those compartments lead to much poorer local cooling and are arguably worse for hygiene.
In other words: there's reason why we moved from these designs, they had pros and cons and the focus was price and power efficiency.
These are valid points, yet anecdotally it seems like modern fridges are less reliable and require more frequent replacement. Old fridges were "inefficient" because they didn't have an integrated variable speed motor and control board. But modern fridges seem to suffer a critical failure of some mysterious component 2 months after their warranty expires. This component can only be fixed by replacing the entire control board, and that's half the cost of a new one. Wouldn't you rather just buy a new one?
But if you zoom out, is it globally more efficient to trash the whole fridge every 5 years, or use an "inefficient" fridge with replaceable parts for 40 years?
Modern appliances are all slowly heading in the same direction.
It starts with DRM on replaceable items like water filters. Then un-mutable advertisements playing on the screen. Then subscription fees for "options". Then subscription fees for things like being able to open the doors. Then fridge-as-a-service where you rent the entire fridge and the fridge vendor resells your personal information to anyone and everyone.
There will be a "vintage replica" premium market for rich hipsters to enjoy the luxury of a fridge without any of these features. But this market will be short-lived. The vintage fridges are just modern fridges dressed up in vintage sheet metal. They buy their critical components from the same wholesalers as the DRM vendors, so eventually they'll be compelled to put in the same features. Maybe they'll be permitted to use an old-timey font on a round touchscreen with a chrome bezel, to maintain the vintage vibe.
I picture the execs of these companies studying Black Mirror episodes in darkened boardrooms... "Are you writing this down, Dave? This show is a gold mine!"
I mean I don’t know how serious you are, but I am when I say I have a list in my notes of “appliances I might eventually need someday and should buy when I have spare cash before they won’t be available without a computer anymore”.
This reminds me of the same types of complaints around air travel now versus the 50s/60s. Both ignore the relative costs and the fact that you can still buy high-end fridges or first class tickets if you are willing to spend the same amount of money that you would have had to back then.
True, but even most high-end brands these days are more about fashion and high markups for the illusion of luxury than actually better quality. Though at least they generally have far better customer service, which makes a big difference.
> you can still buy high-end fridges or first class tickets if you are willing to spend the same amount
Can you, though?
Or has the maker of that high-end $1500 fridge been brought out by the maker of $500 fridges? Are the two brands made in the same factory, to the same quality standards, while the owners laugh at those chumps who are paying 3x the price just to have a different sticker on the front?
I've brought high-end white goods in the past and found the performance unimpressive. In my case, a high-end washing machine with poor rinse performance.
You can buy column fridge / freezers from sub zero, thermador, miele that are about $20,000-$30,000 (price in Canada) with complete different quality standards
This is, of course, why you should always investigate the corporate structure of your appliance makers. There certainly are high-end, or at least highish-end brands in that camp, but it's not all of them.
If you want to fly without the security theatre today then a first-class ticket won't cut it. You'd need to get a private jet, which is of higher relative cost than a plane ticket was in the 60s.
Many first class tickets have priority check in, and separate priority security at many major airports. You avoid a lot of the security theatre that way.
> > This reminds me of the same types of complaints around air travel now versus the 50s/60s
The huge difference compared to banck then is TSA, for cultural reasons I don't think many people would complain about not being able to smoke on board or the fact that planes are a tad slower.
Air travel completely changed because for some reason ill intentioned people decided to bring their ill intentions to fruition on a plane instead of a train.
As a matter of fact the same group targeted trains in Madrid and London as well as malls, but the assumption is that since trains and malls cannot be defended fatalism is not only authorized, but it's the only game in town. Stark comparison to the process you have to undertake to catch a plane, where you have to provide an x-ray of your bowels before being allowed to board.
In the 50s and 60s where you could board first and then purchase the ticket on board....can you imagine something like this today?
Choosing the 1950s as a great time for air travel seems like an odd choice, the first pressurized airliners to be used widely started in the late 1960s.
Air travel in the 1950s was done in slow propeller planes like a DC-6, which were very loud, had a low service ceiling, had a low range, weren't particularly safe, and were unattainably expensive for most people to use.
The 747 was only put in to service in 1970, the 737 in 1968.
Double decker airframes? Since you're talking about the 1950s, you're sure not referring to what I think that means (747/A380-style "double decker"). What do you mean by your statement.
Smoking on board? Yeah, as a non-smoker, that change was a major improvement. It may have done dirty to the smokers, but those are not the majority...
A side not I always wondered why don't we have refrigerator models that are "split system" as we have with ACs.
As it stands now it's a heat pump that pumps the heat from your refrigerator into your home. Wouldn't it be possible to create way more energy efficient model that has an outside body? Or even better connects to the AC body you already have outside? Like in the summer it would "help" the AC by being another AC itself, and in the winter it would effectively be "free" as it got its cold from the outside.
I'm sure there's a reason nobody has attempted this (complexity / price) but was just wondering what the data point on something like this would be? Presumably with modern buildings this could be reduced accommodated, especially with geothermal AC being on the rise right now, would be cool to have all your heat pump systems connected to a single loop, sharing efficiency.
While I really like the idea of a split system approach you run into some big installation issues. Namely, the refrigerant is a restricted product that can only be handled by licensed professionals.
Thus, what I would like to see is a system where the refrigerator has two air pipes to the outside and a concept of heating/cooling load. It would have an ambient temperature thermostat that would say to reject heat indoors if it's below X degrees in the room, otherwise reject it to the outdoors. It would also have the concept of using outdoor air in lieu of it's compressor if it was cold enough.
(And I would like to see an integrated HVAC temperature control, also--you set the minimum, ideal and maximum temperatures. If ambient air can be used in lieu of power it does so--and stops at the ideal temperature rather than the limit temperature. Instead of heat/cool/off settings you have on/vacation/off, in vacation mode it only enforces the minimum and maximum and ignores the ideal and it has different settings for minimum and maximum. And, yes, I want a maximum when on vacation--I don't want to bake the insides at the 110F that could easily happen in the summer here.)
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to water-cool the refrigerator's condenser coils, and use the heated water as input for a dishwasher or kitchen sink.
> Wouldn't it be possible to create way more energy efficient model that has an outside body?
Lots of shops (think mostly of butchers, charcuterie or take-away restaurants) here in Argentina do this, I think mostly to avoid all that heat and noise being trapped in the premises.
Most residential units match one outside compressor to a single interior evaporator because to use one exterior unit for both you'd need way more complex valves to control which unit is receiving cooling.
Even if your matching one to one you have the added cost of running all the lines associated with that including having a trades person coming out to install and charge the extra piping between the two units and installing the exterior unit that will need power. It's just massively simpler to have a complete unit you can drop down and optionally connect to water.
Or if not outside, I wonder if you could dump the heat someplace inside that is better than just dumping it into the inside air? Such as dumping it into the hot water heater.
Because you have to worry about cycle times. Central AC is sized to cool the entire house and is only used when its hot outside. Tying a fridge to the central AC would give frequent and very short cycle times because it doesn't require the removal of as many BTUs. The AC system's life expectancy would then be shortened.
This is why its more efficient to have your fridge in your garage versus your kitchen. You aren't having ac fight your fridge generating heat. You aren't having your fridge fight your stove baking out the room.
Modern home refrigerators are efficient enough thanks to insulation materials and efficient heat pump. Adding external unit just for 500kWh/y to 300kWh/y is not what we want.
Bought a Sony receiver around June 2021. The thing has barely had time to get dusty and its never been over ~20W. It's already dead, or dying at least. The power supply caps are bad and it power cycles itself when it tries to drive the speakers.
It's not a high end model; I'm not an audiophile trying to get 0.001% THD at 10KWs. But lunching itself 25 months into a 24 month warranty... wtf.
> Parts were dipped in paint rather than sprayed leading to fuller and thicker paint coverage
This doesn't sound right to me... You can apply powdercoats much thicker than wet paint because the lack of an evaporating liquid carrier means much less worry about runs and sags. Modern powdercoats can also be much harder than traditional wet paints, and often more chemical resistant. They're also better for the environment, since you're not filling the air with evaporating solvents.
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- that removable veggie holder in the door looks crazy heavy and super awkward to put back in place (lining up at a sharp angle while gripping likely slick sides)
- you have to open the refrigerator door to get at the freezer
- the door compartments are narrow and probably can't handle odd sized containers
- the shelves have holes in them so anything that drips off that uncovered plate of food gets all over everything below it
- the ice ejector is completely unnecessary in our current world of ice makers. I doubt that fridge has a water line coming into it
- the shelves don't look like they have adjustable height so you're stuck with 3 shelves that can't fit a gallon of milk
I've got no idea why you'd really want the removable bin for vegetables. Carry all my veggies over to the sink first and then pick out the ones I want? And look at how small that thing is.
Pull out shelves seem nice I guess, but they'd only be useful on lower shelves. My fridge seems to be about a foot taller than the one in the video. This person wouldn't be tall enough to see all the stuff on the top shelf if it were pulled out.
Pull-out shelves not so much (all the fridges I've had, had adjustable but "locked" glass shelving, I would assume for hygiene as a glass shelf is much easier to clean regularly or after a spill, plus they don't block light so much), but they are available on expensive or professional fridges.
They say in the video that it's for when you bring a bunch of fresh vegetables home. You put the bin next to the sink and then load the vegetables into the bin as you wash them.
How much gunk can get into shelves rails.
I clean fridge twice a year and would like not to do it more often.
Modern fridges are optimized for easy cleaning.
Not to mention that this freezer is likely: 1. Not self-defrosting, and likely to build up ice since you open the door each time you open the fridge. 2. Definitely less convenient. I have a fairly cheap, small refrigerator - one that fits in my attic apartment - and the freezer has pull-out drawers. Since it sits under the fridge, this is usually nice.
Sliding shelves -- I see stuff sticking to the upper shelf and falling behind onto the lower one, making it impossible to draw this one back and close the fridge. (Occasionally you have to stuff things in plastic bags onto each other, because of lack of space, and they push onto the upper shelf; or sometimes bags get pushed to the back wall and freeze to it -- and it's no problem on still shelves.)
This reminds me of cellphone Sony J70, with a scrolling wheel. I wanted one badly in 2002, bought one -- and turned out it wasn't much more convenient (the wheel wasn't smooth) and it broke the very first time I dropped the phone on the floor. Repair was costy. That's how I learned that seemingly cool features have downsides to them.
And you get can similar sized, simple fridges (that are still probably vastly cheaper) for like the same price as that one, but minimum wage is like 8x higher today.
[0]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/256058911098
[1]: https://www.thekitchn.com/refrigerators-under-500-23525115
My childhood fridge had wire shelves. The most common problem was when mom's sourdough starter would get frisky and blow the lid off its plastic container, spreading starter goo to all sorts of things. Seemed to happen at least once a year.
This gas oven is so heavy that light in the kitchen gravitationally lenses around it, but it's still going strong and the best oven I ever used.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
They used a shielded bimetalic thermostat to measure the radiant heat coming from the toast surface, instead of a timer, to establish doneness (consistently toasting despite heating element variance) and implemented the mechanical lowering & raising of toast without a single motor (which is why 60+ year old examples still work).
The toast slot is too narrow. You can't heat a bagel - well, technically you can force it in there, but it won't come back out with some help from a utensil.
They get flakey and you end up bouncing the toast a dozen times to get it to lower. Yes, I know there's an adjustment, but it's finicky and annoying. It's a toaster for crying out loud.
Yes, the design is ingenious, but there's a good reason they aren't made anymore.
s/visible/noticeable
s/noticeable/noticeable with a naked eye
s/lensing/gravitational lensing
α = 4GM/((c^2)b), where b is the impact parameter[0].
Apparently human visual acuity is 0.3 milli-radians, so if b = 1 meter, that's approximately "the moon" (in at most a 1 meter radius volume)…
…assuming I didn't mix up my units in this formula I never used before, though it feels about right given the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth is ~ centimetres.
[0] never heard of this before just now; I think it's the shortest distance between the central point and the path the light would have taken if it hadn't been deflected?
22 grams. That is how heavy my glasses are.
>The angle of deflection (theta) is:
theta = (4GM)/(cr^2)
toward the mass M at a distance r from the affected radiation, where G is the universal constant of gravitation and c is the speed of light in vacuum.
[0]The best resolution our eyes can offer is about one arcminute (1/21600 of a turn). Depending on your distance from the object, just plug in some numbers.
Say at the earth-moon distance 384400 km the object must be about 24x the mass of the sun to bend the incoming light at one arcminute (~0,0002909rad).
The sun actually bends light at about 2 arcseconds as seen from Earth; the focal point would be about 542x the distance Sun-Earth. [1]
Alternatively the object of say 1m^3 volume at a distance of 10 meters will bend light by 1 arcminute if it weighs 3.27x10^16 kg, the density of about 1/10th of a neutron star.
To conclude: one will be instantly overwhelmed by the gravitational forces before being able to see an object bend light with one own eyes. That's why this kind of extreme bending/lending is reserved for galaxy clusters.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens#Explanation...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
Deleted Comment
So, really I don't understand what this post is referencing. The fridges from today are vastly better than that thing, especially when you consider things like temperature control, power usage, space, and usability.
Can you buy worse fridges? Sure. You can spend substantially less and get something more barebones.
That looks right. Here's the start of the fridge section in the 1950 Sears spring/summer catalog to give an idea of what it was like then [1]. Here's the start of the freezer section [2].
[1] https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1950-Sea...
[2] https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1950-Sea...
- The big pile of fruits and veggies is a good way to pressure-bruise them, and also to trap ethylene, and you can usually get the crisper drawers out so not sure I see the difference.
- Special compartments for butter and cheese are a completely unnecessary lack of flexibility.
- Metal roll-out trays / drawers exist in high-end fridges, there are also drawer fridges and freezers for some use cases (mostly compact kitchens / appartments where you don't have the space for swing doors).
- The ice cube thing seems like a complete mis-feature, there are 4 ice cube trays integrated which seems fine, why would you move those to a bucket of ice cubes losing 1/3rd the freezer space and congealing the cubes together? If you regularly need industrial quantities of ice cubes, getting a quarter-size (100L) chest freezer seems like a better idea. Or an upright if you have a lot of frozen stuff which you need regular access to (or you don't have a cellar to put a half or full-size chest in).
I use a portion of my freezer space for ice cubes. I make a batch of ice in the ice machine, and then freeze it until it gets low and/or used. My fridge doesn't have an ice machine and this uses less freezer space than ice cube trays.
I use the ice to make delicious alcoholic drinks, and would happily make more ice than I ever though I'd need just to avoid having to make it when inconvenient.
The drawer is in the middle above the freezer in a French style fridge. You can set the temp to things like fruit, meat, or cheese but we prefer a dedicated produce area.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
I expect there's some survivorship bias at play here.
The only one that’s survived longer than a few years for me? The new one. Going 6 years strong.
Not everything on my new one is perfect—I managed to break the built in water jug—but I feel a lot of the replies here need to take into account survivorship bias.
I've got a fridge that uses 1Kwhr/day whihc places it near the bottom of the current energy start guidelines and it's about 15 years old.
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I expect the sealing and ethylene scrubbing will keep veggies fresh linger.
My fridge does have a veggie section but I use that for beer.
Washing machines whose outer clading is the only thing that holds it together, so they strongly flex as they run, wearing the barrings and belts out.
the water sensing tech that is required by law is built with so many easy to fail parts that it probably has caused more waste than has ever saved water.
And, it's labeled as a premium, major new feature.
Point is, the needs of a fridge barely changed in 70 years, the only real expectation we had was that they would become cheaper to buy and run and easier to operate and maintain, all things modern fridges achieved to do.
I would also argue that the ice cube breaker is a non-feature and that shelves being so easily removable is a minus rather than a pro. The ones on the door would easily break and the other ones could be easily pulled (sending every other thing on that shelf on the floor) if something got stuck.
The door shelves also having all of those compartments lead to much poorer local cooling and are arguably worse for hygiene.
In other words: there's reason why we moved from these designs, they had pros and cons and the focus was price and power efficiency.
But if you zoom out, is it globally more efficient to trash the whole fridge every 5 years, or use an "inefficient" fridge with replaceable parts for 40 years?
Modern appliances are all slowly heading in the same direction.
It starts with DRM on replaceable items like water filters. Then un-mutable advertisements playing on the screen. Then subscription fees for "options". Then subscription fees for things like being able to open the doors. Then fridge-as-a-service where you rent the entire fridge and the fridge vendor resells your personal information to anyone and everyone.
There will be a "vintage replica" premium market for rich hipsters to enjoy the luxury of a fridge without any of these features. But this market will be short-lived. The vintage fridges are just modern fridges dressed up in vintage sheet metal. They buy their critical components from the same wholesalers as the DRM vendors, so eventually they'll be compelled to put in the same features. Maybe they'll be permitted to use an old-timey font on a round touchscreen with a chrome bezel, to maintain the vintage vibe.
I picture the execs of these companies studying Black Mirror episodes in darkened boardrooms... "Are you writing this down, Dave? This show is a gold mine!"
It's like with electric bikes. You can buy VanMoof (bling) or Gazelle (quality).
Can you, though?
Or has the maker of that high-end $1500 fridge been brought out by the maker of $500 fridges? Are the two brands made in the same factory, to the same quality standards, while the owners laugh at those chumps who are paying 3x the price just to have a different sticker on the front?
I've brought high-end white goods in the past and found the performance unimpressive. In my case, a high-end washing machine with poor rinse performance.
Heuristic: If you can buy it at Lowe's/Home Depot, it probably isn't high end.
The huge difference compared to banck then is TSA, for cultural reasons I don't think many people would complain about not being able to smoke on board or the fact that planes are a tad slower.
Air travel completely changed because for some reason ill intentioned people decided to bring their ill intentions to fruition on a plane instead of a train.
As a matter of fact the same group targeted trains in Madrid and London as well as malls, but the assumption is that since trains and malls cannot be defended fatalism is not only authorized, but it's the only game in town. Stark comparison to the process you have to undertake to catch a plane, where you have to provide an x-ray of your bowels before being allowed to board.
In the 50s and 60s where you could board first and then purchase the ticket on board....can you imagine something like this today?
Double decker airframes, a standing lounge, smoking on board, unrestrained pets at the lounge…
Nothing compares to the removal of these standards on all domestic flights. No industry did the consumer as dirty.
Air travel in the 1950s was done in slow propeller planes like a DC-6, which were very loud, had a low service ceiling, had a low range, weren't particularly safe, and were unattainably expensive for most people to use.
The 747 was only put in to service in 1970, the 737 in 1968.
Smoking on board? Yeah, as a non-smoker, that change was a major improvement. It may have done dirty to the smokers, but those are not the majority...
As it stands now it's a heat pump that pumps the heat from your refrigerator into your home. Wouldn't it be possible to create way more energy efficient model that has an outside body? Or even better connects to the AC body you already have outside? Like in the summer it would "help" the AC by being another AC itself, and in the winter it would effectively be "free" as it got its cold from the outside.
I'm sure there's a reason nobody has attempted this (complexity / price) but was just wondering what the data point on something like this would be? Presumably with modern buildings this could be reduced accommodated, especially with geothermal AC being on the rise right now, would be cool to have all your heat pump systems connected to a single loop, sharing efficiency.
Thus, what I would like to see is a system where the refrigerator has two air pipes to the outside and a concept of heating/cooling load. It would have an ambient temperature thermostat that would say to reject heat indoors if it's below X degrees in the room, otherwise reject it to the outdoors. It would also have the concept of using outdoor air in lieu of it's compressor if it was cold enough.
(And I would like to see an integrated HVAC temperature control, also--you set the minimum, ideal and maximum temperatures. If ambient air can be used in lieu of power it does so--and stops at the ideal temperature rather than the limit temperature. Instead of heat/cool/off settings you have on/vacation/off, in vacation mode it only enforces the minimum and maximum and ignores the ideal and it has different settings for minimum and maximum. And, yes, I want a maximum when on vacation--I don't want to bake the insides at the 110F that could easily happen in the summer here.)
Lots of shops (think mostly of butchers, charcuterie or take-away restaurants) here in Argentina do this, I think mostly to avoid all that heat and noise being trapped in the premises.
Even if your matching one to one you have the added cost of running all the lines associated with that including having a trades person coming out to install and charge the extra piping between the two units and installing the exterior unit that will need power. It's just massively simpler to have a complete unit you can drop down and optionally connect to water.
Every couple years there's a HN link to a blog post about how those appliances were built better in the day. Couple highlights I remember were:
- Parts were dipped in paint rather than sprayed leading to fuller and thicker paint coverage
- Motors had some changes so were actually built to last
Got to imagine fewer electrical/mechanical parts that can fail as well.
[1] https://carolinasantiqueappliances.com/Web/index.php/restore...
Essentially: electric motors from the 50s were vastly over designed, which meant they were extremely robust to physical failures
The larger point about stuff now vs then is likely the use of capacitors. And specifically, cheap capacitors in consumer electronics.
Absent electronics, you're talking an order of magnitude longer lifespan.
Bought a Sony receiver around June 2021. The thing has barely had time to get dusty and its never been over ~20W. It's already dead, or dying at least. The power supply caps are bad and it power cycles itself when it tries to drive the speakers.
It's not a high end model; I'm not an audiophile trying to get 0.001% THD at 10KWs. But lunching itself 25 months into a 24 month warranty... wtf.
Speaking of reliability, I just replaced the start capacitor in my 20 year-old garage door opener. The replacement failed in less than 3 weeks!
This doesn't sound right to me... You can apply powdercoats much thicker than wet paint because the lack of an evaporating liquid carrier means much less worry about runs and sags. Modern powdercoats can also be much harder than traditional wet paints, and often more chemical resistant. They're also better for the environment, since you're not filling the air with evaporating solvents.
More seriously, if I find the time I’ll try to link to it.
I’m sure there’s a better way to paint things now but I think we often don’t for appliances.
Hopefully not lead paint?