Here’s how to opt out.
  • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    Have these functions actually proved useful? I think I’ve had maybe one fridge failure in my entire lifetime that resulted in a complete loss of contents. And many dumb fridges these days have open door alarms.

    • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      The door monitor mostly helps when a kid walks off leaving it open thinking they closed it.

      The freezer temperature monitoring has saved the contents several times. A breaker had tripped once and I didn’t notice, it let me know that I needed a generator during a power outage, and one of the kids snuck an ice cream and left the lid wide open.

      So yeah, it’s been useful. It’s not needed 99% of the time.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        5 days ago

        An alarm that beeps when the door is left open more than X minutes (say, 5 minutes) only requires a stupidly simple circuit and about $5 in parts.

        No smarts needed (though it’s probably cheaper to make it with a microcontroller than have the timer circuit be done with discrete parts).

    • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      IIRC, there was a Technology Connections YT upload where he was doing some power monitoring. At random an ice cube got stuck in the ice maker and the result was an enormous increase in power consumption.

      My family’s present fridge is absolute trash trash too. I wasn’t involved and so someone thought a bottom freezer was the prettiest thing ever; zero common sense physics. It tends to seal poorly on the freezer and makes no warnings, but goes into a weird boot loop over time. I think it is actually the main timer in a microcontroller failing to compensate from overrunning the register because cycling the power via the circuit breaker solves the issue for a few weeks. Anyways, I think there is a case to be made for active power monitoring, though I doubt that is actually implemented on any smart device as it would reveal quality control errors.

    • Triumph@fedia.io
      0·
      5 days ago

      The only time I’ve ever lost anything from a fridge was when an apartment complex preemptively cleared out the last of our belongings before we finished moving out.

      And that was 30 years ago.