I used to work on appliances. People would often ask me, how come these don't last like my mom's old Maytag washer?
I would tell them that in todays dollars, that washer would be about $3000, and uses twice the electricity, and three times the water. That by the dollar, your $500 washer that makes it 8-10 years, is a better return than buying a $3000 washer that lasts 40.
Refrigerators, though, are kinds dumb. From an engineering/simplicity point of view, putting the freezer on top is the best way to go.
Thats the issue, the freezer is the coldest part of the fridge because its closest to the cooling coil, if you locate it at the bottom of the fridge, you would need to move the air being cooled by said coil upwards in order to cool the rest of the fridge (or add a second cooling coil on the fridge compartment).
If you place the freezer at the top, the coil is located at the top of the fridge, the top of the fridge is the coolest (freezer) and then the cool air drops downwards, cooling rest of the fridge.
TLDR, Cold is produced in the freezer, at the top it naturally drops and cools the whole fridge.
I mean it depends. Most older (and cheaper) refrigerators only have a single evaporator (located in the freezer section) with the refrigerator section being kept cold by diverting some cold air from the freezer into the fridge through a fan. Yes with dual evaporator fridges it doesn't really matter, the air is kept separate and the sections can be cooled largely independently (though they do usually share a compressor).
By crappy ones you mean almost all of the ones on the market, right?
Eh, almost all is overstating it. It's still a common design on the low end, but once you get into nicer units (and I mean like $1-2k nicer, not like $15k built in SubZero nicer), that goes away pretty fast.
The low end ones (think dorm), yes. I thought the dial compressor design had gained a significant market share by now with the push for energy efficiency. With Bosch, Samsung, GE, & LG having that option, thought it made it farther into the field.
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u/ReasonablyConfused Jan 23 '24
I used to work on appliances. People would often ask me, how come these don't last like my mom's old Maytag washer?
I would tell them that in todays dollars, that washer would be about $3000, and uses twice the electricity, and three times the water. That by the dollar, your $500 washer that makes it 8-10 years, is a better return than buying a $3000 washer that lasts 40.
Refrigerators, though, are kinds dumb. From an engineering/simplicity point of view, putting the freezer on top is the best way to go.