Rhetorical refrigeration question

[unixronin]

...Would it be too much to ask to be able to buy a refrigerator/freezer with a bloody THERMOSTAT for each compartment, instead of just a stupid "warmer/colder" dial?  Would it be so unthinkable to be able to set the refrigerator to, say, 36°F and have it just maintain 36°F?

I mean, this should be something you set once for each compartment and forget about it until you replace the refrigerator.  Instead, we get a pair of stupid little plastic dials that affect each other in non-intuitive ways and which you have to keep constantly futzing with as the weather gets warmer and colder and the food load changes, in an effort to maintain sensible refrigerator and freezer temperatures, when the same job could be done automatically by two fifty-cent thermostats and a brain-damaged embedded controller.

Is this complete ass, or what?

Comments

[bbwoof.livejournal.com]

If the manufacturer did as you suggest, using two fifty-cent thermostats, then they could not ask you to pay upwards of $400 for their fancy refrigerator, now could they?

I agree with you. Temperature control is sufficient; "environmental control" is overengineering. Unless your ambient environment is grossly humid, "environmental control" is unnecessary. Any air chiller is by definition a dehumidifier.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

We do live in NC at the moment. :-)

And yes, it is a swamp. A piece of land that periodically floods. :-p

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I've seen them with two dials, one for the main temp and one to regulate the ratio between fridge and freezer. I think the problem comes in that there's only one compressor and only one set of heat exchanger coils, so you kinda have to move the fridge and freezer temperatures together.

If it was just one or the other, yeah, a digital thermostat would be a piece of cake. But independently regulating two sets of cold off one system like that... dicey at best.

[felinecanine.livejournal.com]

...Would it be too much to ask ...

Well, that depends on how much you are willing to spend. I believe many
high-end units have this kind of feature. I found
one example (http://www.kitchenaid.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ExecMacro/prod_feat_major.d2w/report?prmenbr=136&prrfnbr=643452&feat_nbr=407) on the Kitchen-Aid website.

Or if you're into do-it-yourself solutions, there's
this (http://www.homebrewers.com/product/500326)

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

The plug in thermometer looks poorly designed to regulate both the fridge and the freezer. If I only used one of them I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Now to go back to that site and look at the brewing supplies.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I currently have a $1000 fridge but it still has brain-dead temperature control. BTW, try, just try to find a higher-end fridge that *doesn't* have an in-door ice maker. It took me WEEKS to find this model, and it only came in black. Fortunately, I think black fridges are totally cool. ;-)

[captoblivion.livejournal.com]

I will not complain here. I have a 30-year-old fridge in the ugliest brown ever created. It has three shelves and weighs the same as my wife's car. It has three shelves and four moving parts (two of which are doors) and rust stains.

The temperature hardly ever wavers, and I have never had to sit in the floor with a hair dryer to defrost it. I'm going to stick with it...

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

And hey, you could always spraypaint it.

-Ogre

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Heh. Sounds like our fridge. We inherited with the house. It came from Poppa's (Goose's great grandfather) house in Spring Hope, NC. He used to work for Sears.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, have you seen how disgusting with mold and crud in-door icemakers (or more properly, through-the-door ice chutes) get on the inside? And you can't clean them without ripping the door apart. I sure don't want one.

When we're next buying a fridge, we may look at Viking. Or we saw a nice (if a bit on the small side) bottom-freezer unit in brushed stainless steel at Sam's, with bins and trays in a freezer drawer instead of shelves, so you don't lose all the cold air every time you open the freezer.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Yes... The day that we went to get the Sewing Machine (it gets capitalized...) lilmissnever and I whiled away an hour in Mt. View going through a high-end kitchen store, drooling over stainless appliances.

Mmmmmm, stainless.

-Ogre

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Bottom freezer is the way to go. My fridge has this nice design-an-interior feature that lets you do modular design of the layout (and also makes the modules easy to clean---you just take them out and put them in the sink. You'd think that with all the other thought, someone would have thought of a thermostat, by now, though.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Modular interior? Cool. How modular is it, though? I've seen modular-stuff-in-door, but generally just combined with a few movable shelves.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

You can move around the shelves and drawers, and the height settings are about 2" apart, so the spacing is pretty adaptable. The modules divide down the middle of the fridge, so that each side can be individually configured. I understand that if you want to get fancy, you can custom order, say, extra veggie drawers, or coldcuts drawers. You have the option of having the egg tray in the door or in the fridge compartment, too. (I use the fridge.)

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Have you ever noticed that Apple Computer's Finder never, ever reports file copy performance (Bytes/sec)? They don't want provide you with metrics with which to criticize them.

Why should a Refridgerator manufacturer be any different?

Besides, they'd have to calibrate it, and then arrange that it stays calibrated over the life of the unit.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

So, Macintosh weenie... tell me how do you get MacOS (greater than 7.5.3 but not up to X yet, forget the exact number) to stop indexing the hard disk? There just isn't enough space on the current hard drive for the index file nor is there any need to do so.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It's 9.1.3, I think (About just says 9.1). We have the 9.2.1 and 9.2.2 updaters, but 9.2.1 dislikes something on it and won't install.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

In one of the menus that is available when Find File is running, there is an option to schedule indexing. Set that to "never" and you won't have to suffer the indexing or the space it takes up.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Ha! No wonder I couldn't find it in the control panel!

Thanks. :)

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

He thinks he found what you're referring to. Thank you.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Heh. I worked at Apple Computer from July 1988 to March 1997, and while I am not a MacOS developer (their APIs are horrifying), I did pay attention...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I've done a little bit of Mac development work myself.... worked on Macs among other platforms at STI, and my team wrote a DOS-like CLI shell for the Mac at EWU. I remember sorting out all the toolboxes and managers was a pain in the ass.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Heh. We've got several friends working at Apple these days and another who is interviewing soon. I sort of browbeat unixronin in to getting some Macintoshes for the girls. Most of their games use Quicktime and have a horrible tendency to crash/blue screen on Windows. But as almost every single CD comes Win/Mac ... get a Macintosh and watch it run fine.