How often have you opened the fridge door and stood in front of your appliance pondering what you want to eat? Chances are you probably do this more than you realize, and LG is hoping its latest InstaView Door-in-Door refrigerators will help put an end to this energy-wasting habit.
The LG InstaView refrigerators were first launched in 2015, and feature a black glass panel on the door. Tapping twice on this glass panel will illuminate a light, allowing you to see what’s in the fridge without having to open the door.
The panel also doubles as a door-in-door that provides quick access to items at the front of the fridge, and ensures less cold air escapes than when opening the main door.
For the first time, the InstaView refrigerators now have a glass panel that extends across the whole upper half of the right-hand door, allowing you to see even more of the fridge’s contents.
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UV sanitizing water dispenser
The new InstaView fridges also feature a water dispenser that employs ultraviolet light to sanitize the tap, reducing the spread of potentially harmful germs into drinking water.
LG says the technology is activated automatically for 10 minutes, once an hour once and will remove up to 99.99% of bacteria, including E. coli and pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can result in pneumonia, from the water dispenser tap. It can also be activated on-demand by pressing a button on the fridge whenever you want with the press of a button.
The refrigerators also work with the LG ThinQ app, so you can see how much energy they’re consuming. You can also receive an alert if the door has been left open, and even adjust the brightness of the interior lighting depending on the time of day.
Analysis: Energy-saving as well as time-saving
There’s no denying the InstaView panel is extremely handy – before I head to the supermarket I always check what’s in the refrigerator, and I’ll often end up opening the door several times while I’m writing my shopping list.
Every time the refrigerator door is opened, the temperature inside the fridge rises, meaning the compressor has to kick in to reduce it to an appropriate level. According to Home Energy magazine, opening the door accounts for 7% of the energy a fridge uses, based on 42 openings a day – that figure may initially seem high, but when I total up how often I and my other half open our fridge each day, it’s actually pretty accurate.
The average refrigerator uses 162kwh of energy each year, research by the the Energy Saving Trust revealed, so by reducing how many times you open the fridge door you could knock more than 11kwh a year off that total.
Globally, energy wastage is a huge issue – in the US alone it equates to 283 kwh of electricity per person per year, which is the equivalent of running an electric oven at 350F / 175 C for six days, so anything that can be done to reduce this figure in our eyes is a huge step forward.
