this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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I can't think of a single thing on a fridge that needs to be smart.
The people designing them should be smart. Should be...
its the same people that bought the 2k beds, and aws froze and heated up the beds.
Not 2k beds. 2k bed covers. You still needed your own bed.
I thought I read about beds also being stuck in a reclined position.
That version is significantly more expensive. Still requires you to bring your own mattress lol
that is so much worst, not even a bed, but a bed cover lol. people were discussing how they wernt pulling the plug on the 2k covers, because they would have to admit they spent 2k on a smart"bedc over"
Nothing needs to be, but I do like to monitor door status and temperature for my fridge and deep freezers with home assistant.
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.
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.
Hmm, my fridge is in my kitchen, which is in the middle of the house. I've never been in a situation where the fridge door has been open more than a couple minutes without me noticing, and I have three kids.
I've had two fridges die (well, the same one twice), and that sucked, but there's not much I could do about it even if I knew a few hours earlier, and I use the fridge enough I'll notice within a few hours. Refrigerator deliveries often happen after a few days, and I'm not going to keep stocking ice during that period, I'll just consume what I can and move the important stuff to the mini fridge or chest freezer.
It would be cool, sure, but it's not worth having it connected to the internet.
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).
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.
To Home Assistant! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. 🍻