RavenBlog - Comments 1145902610

Comments on Monday 24 April 2006:

When I was recently arrived back in the UK, something that was horrifying me a lot was the fact that the price I was paying per night for a hotel (only for a couple of nights mind) was an amount of money with which I could buy more than a thousand packets of instant noodles, or nearly six hundred tins of beans. After a few nights of that I could have built my own house out of food containers. As a consequence of that train of thought, I present "What Else Could I Buy?"

If you were intending to buy two nights in a crummy hotel for GB£170.00, you could instead buy:

thirteen kilograms of swiss chocolate
seven kilograms of cheese
two thousand, one hundred and twenty-five 65g packets of Tesco value instant noodles
twelve milliseconds of TV advertisement during the Superbowl
twenty kung-fu lessons
one hundred and thirty-two grams of marijuana
eight hundred and nine cigarettes
five thousand, six hundred and eighty-five 5mm light-emitting diodes
one hundred and seventy lottery tickets, probably worthless
four hundred and three packets of itching powder

What are you thinking of buying?

Have a play with that.

Unrelatedly, on the flight to the UK I saw the movie "The Promise", which IMDB seems to think is horrible, but I thought was great. It's like The Princess Bride made in Hong Kong on a big budget. In the same way as The Princess Bride, the plot is stupid but simultaneously coherent and fun. In the same way, the woman is stupid and annoying and the guy continues to love her anyway. There aren't any exploding giant rats, but there are reasonable equivalents.

Unrelated to that, a super-efficient and inexpensive fridge, and a solar distiller. [14:16]

Nameless

The fridges are made the way they are as an issue on visual nature and human laziness over practicality. Most people would rather be able to easily view varing shelves of food at once instead of looking at them in stacks in a chest. Another reason is the amount of floor space in the average kitchen its at something of a premium in most houses. People are willing to pay for the energy wasted for the convience of a standing fridge at least with historical energy prices.

RavenBlack

Mm, also I suspect some amount of inertia - kitchens are designed around front-opening appliances, so appliances must be front-opening. If a kitchen was built with top-opening appliances in mind, they could be more space-efficient, eg. they could use the corner slots that are normally wasted space.

Though also I don't know how much of the efficiency difference is due to top-opening - how much power would a front-opening freezer converted to a fridge with a thermostat use? I may have to experiment.

Nameless

probably a fair amount of wasted energy in front loading though I've done no expermentation. Just looking at the amount of frosted air that falls out of the front opening freezer when it opens compared with the amount falling out of the opening of top door freezers.

RavenBlack

Mm, but that would vary by how often you open it, too. But I expect there's also a fair bit of loss through the thin layer of rubber-insulation around the door. But still, I want to know how much is lost to that and how much is lost just to the lesser insulation all around a fridge.

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