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For putting the thermal mass above the food, could a workaround be to put a heat sink on the bottom of the lid, and connect it to the thermal mass with an equally heat conductive material?

Also, before I saw what the heat sink was, I wondered if you could use shotcrete on the walls of the freezer, to act as the thermal mass.




I was wondering if this might work better with a traditional freezer-on-top refrigerator where you just use the freezer as pure thermal mass.


The chest style is optimal because with a traditional freezer-on-top refrigerator, you lose a lot of cold air each time you open the door. Whereas with the chest style, hardly anything is lost because the cold air doesn't rise.


I think we might be talking about different kinds of optimality.

I think the chest style is best for total energy consumption. But as we saw, his biggest problem was around thermal stability. If we put the freezer/fridge fan under computer control, you might be able to get more stable fridge temperatures despite the air loss because you can drive the freezer temperature much lower, getting more stability value from the thermal mass. (And it's also worth filling in any big air spaces in the fridge with more thermal mass, so that opening the door is not a big deal.)


> Whereas with the chest style, hardly anything is lost because the cold air doesn't rise.

Depends how quickly you open it and slam it shut afterwards.




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