Say an open fridge door loses 1 Joule's worth of cool air every second. Opening or closing the door blows a lot of air so you lose 10J.
If I'm just pouring milk in my coffee I can usually do that in 5 seconds so I should keep the fridge open because 10+5+10 < 10+1+10 + 10+1+10 (if it takes 1 second to get milk).
If I am making a sandwich then I should definitely grab everything (12 seconds), close the door, make a sandwich (3 minutes), then put everything back because 10+12+10 + 10+12+10 < 10 + 180 + 10.
Say it takes seconds to grab or return something and seconds to grab it and use it and return it. Then we should close the fridge if .
What if I'm not sure how long something will take?
Suppose the time to pour my coffee is drawn from a nearly normal distribution with mean 8 seconds and s.d. 2 seconds. I'm better off on average leaving the door open. Even if it's already been 10 seconds, I expect to be done very soon. So I should always leave the door open.
(Scaled) geometric distribution: Half the time, when I would be done, another thing comes up (milk is sealed, spoon not in drawer) that takes another 4 seconds. I always expect to be done 8 seconds later, so I should still always keep the door open I think.
What if I have no idea how long something will take? The door is open and I'm waiting and waiting for the toddler to give back the iced mocha latte and it's sure been a while. Must I take some prior? Is there a mystery here or is this just standard bayesian stuff?
I don't thunk your model is correct. Opening the fridge causes the accumulated cold air to fall out over a period of a few (maybe 4-7?) seconds, after which it doesn't really matter how long you leave it open, as the air is all room temp. The stuff will slowly take heat from the room temp air, at a rate of about 1 degree/minute. Once the door is closed, it takes a few minutes (again, IDK how long) to get the air back to 40F, and then however long to extract the heat from the stuff. If you are chosing between "stand there with it open" and "take something out, use it, amd put it back within a few minutes" there is no appreciable difference in the air temp inside the fridge for those two options - in both cases things will return to temp some minutes after the last closing. You can empirically test how long it takes to re-cool the air simply by getting a fridge thermometer and seeing how the temperature varies with different wait times. Or just see how long before the escaping air "feels cold" again.
Something that may help build a better model/intuition is this video from Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAhWgkKlHI
I mentally visualize the cold air as a liquid when I open the door, or maybe picturing it looking similar to the fog from dry ice.
Since it's cold, it falls downward, "pouring" out onto the floor, and probably does not take more than a few seconds, though I would love to see someone capture it on video with a thermal camera.
After that, I figure it doesn't really matter how long the door is open, until you start talking... (read more)