distributedlife

We’ve got a slight problem with our fridge. The last couple of cartons of milk have gone off well before their used by date. We are not sure if the problem is with the manufacturer or with the fridge. Everything in the fridge is cool to the touch. We don’t have a thermometer so we can really be sure how cold it is.

We decided to change the temperature control in the fridge. It was on five and I said that it should be four. Milk is best kept at about four degrees centigrade. As I went to change it my brother piped up and said that five is colder than four because the range is between one and seven and next to one is the word min and next to seven, max.

I argued that max could mean the maximum temperature of the fridge and that minimum is better. In the end we got the book out and seven is maximum coldness. He was right.

Now, the point of all this is that this is fridge with one control for temperature. It should not be hard to design a system that is logical and intuitive.

I can see that they used their own system, one to seven, for temperature control so that the same part can be used for Fahrenheit and Celsius regions of the world. But why did they buck the trend of all temperature scales where the lower the number is colder and the higher, warmer.

It would have been worth asking if having numbers of one to seven would confuse anyone in a Celsius region of the world where one to seven are about the range a fridge should be at.

It would have made more sense to use the words Coldest and Cold instead of Max and Min and then not have any numbers at all.

Fridge temperature controls, shouldn’t really a valid blog topic.