Home: Cool advice on getting the best from your fridge

It's possibly your only always-on appliance, but how well do you really know your refrigerator?

As seen on The Home Edit, Netflix, these iDesign pull-out drawer-style fridge boxes contain a removable divider to let you sort small jars, snacks, fruit cups, individual yoghurts and more. Integrated handles make it easy to grab and go. Measure up the fridge before you order; from €26.99 at organisedstore.ie.

Fridges. We treat them as big, dopey, cooling wardrobes. Blithely throwing food in there at the end of a week of Ben-Hur dashes around the supermarket, it’s predictable chaos by Friday night. We all know that sour-scented tangle of drinks, condiments, meat, veg and leftovers. Your teenager treats the appliance as a soft, soothing night light — making a leisurely 20-minute phone call as they stir through the mangled foodstuffs and containers. Top shelves become a place of eerie mystery, while orphaned, expensive buys moulder. Over 49kg per person of all the foodstuffs we buy in Ireland is flung out uneaten — 1.1m tonnes a year, at a monetary loss of €700 per household (EPA, October 2022).

The new technologies around cooling appliances focus on two of our major failings in handling our fridges and their ballast — a lack of meal planning and placing the foodstuffs in the wrong parts of the cavity for its type. The level of push-notification and constant connection to an expensive appliance dissolves into comedy, in my view. But you could in a world of sheer luxury pay up to €7,300 for a fully loaded super fridge/freezer purring information into your hand-held device night and day.