I’ll bet you hardly ever consider your fridge.  That appliance is actually a pretty sophisticated heat pump apparatus.  With the inclusion of a refrigerant (like Freon), this box (mostly a thin veneer covering loads and loads of insulation) manages to keep the contents around 3 to 5 C, thereby diminishing the ability of microbes to grow and spoil our food.

Back when my mom was a kid, they didn’t have fridges.  They had ice boxes.a box with loads of insulation that relied upon a fresh addition of ice each day to keep the contents cold enough to minimize microbial growth (and food putrefaction).

By the 1920’s, Frigidaire developed the first electric fridge.  And, its use picked up with the development of Freon, which was a great chemical that could continually undergo condensation and evaporation, thereby transferring heat from the refrigerator contents..

My parents still had one of those early fridges (from later 1940 or so).  It was pretty small (holding about 10 cubic feet) and with a kosher home, insufficient space for most of our food.  But that’s not what stands out in my memory.

When I came home from my college adventure (when was 10), I opened the fridge door to find out it was not connected to the frame of the box and it landed on my toes. Let me tell you that door with its insulation felt like it weighted a ton (and did manage to crush a few of my toes).  It did lead my parents to go out and buy a new fridge right away.

All that is prologue to this story.

Whirlpool (which also owns JennAir, KitchenAid, as well as Whirlpool) is developing a whole new box for refrigerators.  Not only will the capacity be increased, but energy usage will be slashed.  They’ve termed this new design “SlimTech”.

SlimTech avoids the use of thick polyurethane foam and plastic that is the characteristic of current fridge formats.  It relies on vacuum insulation (with a thin layer of compressed, proprietary powder) sealed inside walls of steel.  This renders the doors 60% thinner and yields an interior capacity increase of about 25%.

With the walls of current fridges with their polyurethane foam and plastic averaging some 5 centimeters of thickness, SlimTech only requires 2 cm for the walls.  And, the insulation is within the steel structure, so it’s interior lines are cleaner and straighter. That means a current fridge with 17 cubic feet of storage will now have 21 (with the same external dimensions). Not only does the fridge change- but the construction process needed a major transformation (to the tune of $ 16 million).

The high end device should hit the market next year under the JennAir moniker.  The first units will be 30 inches wide, the same size as JennAir’s other models. But, the new device will be made in lower volumes (at least at first), in the thousands; not the 15 to 20 million of its other production lines..

The big problem is that Whirlpool does not envision the line turning a big profit for a while.

It’s great that a company is willing to take a short term loss to improve the technology of a staple, household appliance.  Saving us energy at the same time.

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