Why refrigerator capacity is measured in litres?
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1000 L = 1 m³
It’s more impressive to say a fridge is ~700L than to say that it is 0.7 m³.
It’s a commonly used measure of volume, and a closer fit than for example cubic meters which would make the fridge look small because it would almost always be less than 1 cubic meter.
In areas where the metric system isn’t used I do see fridges advertised in cubic feet.
So in short, they use whatever measurement they think their customers will recognize and understand.
Because a litre is a measurement of volume. How much you can put into the refrigerator is mostly dependend on the volume.
It’s a very standard unit of volume to the majority of the world where metric is the norm. It’s also intuitive to everyday use: many things (e.g. packs of milk) are sold in sizes of 1 liter.
What else would you use?
It’s extremely rare for the mass to be a limiting factor in fridge capacity.
For the Americans we should measure it in hamburgers. What do you guys think, 4 hamburgers per litre?
2400 hamburger fridge.
A liter is a measure of volume. Broadly speaking, most people have a sense of what “size” a liter represents – because we encounter things in stores that are labelled in liters. We “know” that a typical bottle of soda is 2 liters or that carton of milk is 1 liter (1 quart is approx 1 liter) and a gallon of milk is approx 4 liters.
This gives the buyer a sense of how large the inside of the refrigerator is.
It would be less useful to use volumes like m^3 (even though 1 m^3 = 1000 liters) because most people have no sense of m^3 in daily life.
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