Hasta La Ideas

As an incompetent cook and a bachelor living in a city filled with delivery options, I am not the ideal person to comment on the design of a refrigerator; I only open my mostly-empty Hotpoint (terrible name for a ‘fridge, by the way) when I want beer. But this week LG caught my eye when they announced their new “Door-in-Door” French-door refrigerator, which operates thusly:

(The ‘fridge in the video is actually a Kenmore that was released earlier this year, but Consumer Reports reports that “LG actually manufactures many Kenmore refrigerators,” and I believe they’re the same machine.)

As for how it works, the inner door is magnetically sealed; hitting this button with your thumb…

…deactivates the magnet.

For those of you that are members of a heavy-‘fridge-using family of four as seen in the video, do you think this is a worthwhile design innovation, or a gimmick? For their part, LG claims that the door-in-door design provides an energy savings, in that opening just the sub-door to retrieve a commonly-needed item allows less cold air to escape than throwing the whole thing open; this made the needle on my BS meter quiver uncertainly. I do wonder, however, how many sixes of Miller Lite that front door would hold.

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