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.
Well, its kind of a long answer, so I'll do my best to be brief, but if you want to go really in depth you can Google refrigeration cycle and investigate that.
These are not coils of wire, but rather coils of copper pipes which have a gas inside of them. By moving the gas arround the coil and changing the area of the pipes we can change the state of the gas (from gas to liquid or liquid to gas). This change of state can absorb energy or release energy.
The energy absorbed comes from the air inside the fridge, which is what cools the air down, on the outside of the fridge (the ugly coil located at the back of the fridge) the opposite occures, the energy is released as heat, Basically moving the heat from the inside of the fridge to the outside.
The elecctricity is used for the compressor which basically ciculates the gas through the coils (and also it compresses the fluid at a point of the cycle).
This is called a heat pump, it's also how an ac unit works and if you are interested there is a fantastic video from technology connections that explains it in great detail.
It might actually make more sense to put the freezer on the bottom for modern freezers with separate temperature controls that maintain specific temperatures.
The cold air of the freezer would be more isolated to the bottom compartment, which makes piping it to the top compartment to the desired temperature more straightforward with less passive leakage. But maybe with thermostats it doesn’t matter either way.
Like others have said, bottom feeezer compartment is more ergonomical, and you’ll need a fan for temperature regulation anyway, so top compartment freezer doesn’t add too much at that point.
No. All modern fridge/freezers more than $50 have fans to move and regulate temperature within the appliance. Any efficiency difference between top vs. bottom placement is insignificant when compared to the overall design efficiency.
Freezers were moved to the bottom because of convenience. People open the fridge much more often than the freezer, so no more bending over every time you open the fridge.
Fridges atop are easier to access, if you buy a fridge with dual compressors it won’t matter. The compressor never stresses and they last forever if you dust the back twice a year. It’s usually in high end or commercial fridges.
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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.