Hotpoint Day 1 HS1801AA.1 Integrated Fridge Review - Cooling Review

How well does the Hotpoint Day 1 HS1801AA.1 Integrated Fridge keep food cool?

Even loaded up to just 1kg of produce to every 10l of available space, the Hotpoint Day 1 integrated holds plenty of food. We put in 32kg of test packs, plastic bottles and fresh food, evenly placed throughout the compartment’s shelves, drawers and pockets, and measured the temperature in every area, every minute over a week’s typical usage. That’s a lot of food and a lot of data.

The first issue with this Hotpoint was working out what configuration of LEDs would give us our usual target fridge temperature of 4ºC. With no specific temperature control, it’s pure guesswork. After a few trails, we settled on the mid setting (only mid LED illuminated) to give us the most consistent 4ºC result.

And amazingly consistent it was too. Most tall refrigerators will have a wide spread of average temperature from top to bottom, typically anything from 2ºC in the lowest drawers to 7 or 8ºC on the top shelf. Not so the Day 1. Thanks to very efficient forced air circulation cooling, both the drawers and the next three shelves up managed to average close enough to the 4ºC target temperature. The next up and top-shelf hit 4.5ºC and 5ºC respectively, but that’s a fabulously good result against target temp.

Throughout the compressor cycle, the actual temperature on each shelf will fluctuate higher and lower than the average. The smaller that swing in temperature, the longer your fresh food will last – but it’s quite tricky from an engineering perspective to get that to happen.

This Hotpoint takes a decent stab at stable temperatures, with the salad drawer and lower drawer, in particular, doing well, with just +/- 0.5ºC and +/- 0.75ºC swing respectively.

Shelf temperatures are a whole lot more “bouncy”, with the lower shelves registering up to +/- 2ºC either side of their 4ºC average. That still isn’t too shoddy for a very tall fridge.

Surprisingly, given the fan for the forced air circulation is at the top, the upper two shelves fair even better at just +/- 1.5 and +/- 1ºC at the top. That’s a solid result, meaning you could happily stick fruit and veg on the top shelf without too much concern – and that is a rare thing indeed.

While the HS1801AA.1’s performance falls a little shy of the best, it’s biting at the ankles of some very affluent models with even and consisting cooling throughout the compartment. In an ideal world, we’d have loved a very-low temperature compartment for meat and fish, and maybe humidity controls on the salad drawer – but you can’t have it all at this price.

Given the Hotpoint’s very reasonable asking price in the usually expensive built-in appliance sector, the HS1801AA.1’s performance is something of a bargain.

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