Bottom shelf, the bottle with the blue cap placed on top as a marker to show where. Apparently in that spot, when left long enough, it freezes so absolutely slowly that it manages to produce almost perfectly clear ice.
The fridge was given to me from a hotel I used to work for. The fridge works perfectly, I’m not even sure why he bothered to replaced them all, but I ain’t about to argue with a free mini fridge ya know.
I’m sure people are gonna wonder what’s on the top shelf, those are repurposed Ensure protein shake bottles, washed out and refilled with V8 juice. Its a shame those bottles are typically disposed of, they’re mighty rugged, but it’s difficult to get the Ensure smell totally out of them, so I figured tomato juice/V8 ought to do the trick, which it does 👍
Edit: The door hinge is on the right side on this one, for anyone extra curious. And of course, your clear ice mileage may vary wildly from one mini fridge to the next. This one apparently has no temperature setting, it just happens to be preset right at freezing temperature, just barely though. The other bottles around that spot are still liquid, those don’t tend to freeze often.


Strangely, when I first noticed this the other day, the top half of the bottle was frozen, while the bottom half was still liquid. It was an almost perfect 50/50 split. The one in the photo is a different bottle as I drank the first one and watched as the ice melted, but this one now seems to be almost completely frozen, but not quite yet, but still damn near perfectly clear.
Edit: Sometimes the V8 bottles on the top shelf even half freeze, but not often. I guess it partly just depends on the weather and how long the fridge has remained closed. 🤷
Sorry I misremembered, it should be top to bottom. Learned that because NileRed did a video on making perfect ice
Commenting to find this later, need to understand how water could ever freeze in any way besides top to bottom given maximum density at 4C
Water/ice/steam is a weird substance, especially under unusual conditions such as unusual pressure/vacuum/temperatures, even right here on Earth sometimes…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice
Insulate the top so the heat is wicked from the bottom. Its actually the more intuitive way for it to freeze for me, since the slightly warmer molecules would tend to rise to the top
And that’s the counter-intuitive thing about water. Whereas “hot things rise” is true for almost everything, it isn’t for water… at least not in the area around freezing.
Hot things rise because they are less dense than cold. Typically things get more dense the colder they get. Water actually breaks this rule between 4 and 0 degrees C. As you approach freezing, the “slightly warmer” molecules actually sink to the bottom.
I saw that video before too, awesome video as always from NileRed, I love his channel 👍
I thought about mentioning it, but it slipped my mind. If I had to guess, water tends to freeze top down because ice floats on water.