ChillTech Solutions, a Milton Keynes-based manufacturer of internet-connected refrigeration units, has confirmed that the company maintains no records, interest, or indeed awareness of what happens to its products once they leave the distribution centre.
“It’s a bit like when you release a balloon,” explained Martin Wickham, ChillTech’s Head of Post-Purchase Amnesia. “You watch it float away, you wave, and then you genuinely forget it ever existed.”
The admission comes following customer complaints that seventeen of the company’s premium smart fridges have been reduced to expensive insulated boxes after ChillTech discontinued its cloud services. The affected units retailed at £2,400 each. They now perform all the functions of a 1987 Zanussi, minus the reliability.
“We sold about four thousand units between 2019 and 2022,” Wickham said. “Couldn’t tell you where a single one of them is now. Cardiff, maybe? One might be in France. We had an enquiry from France once.”
The ChillTech app, which allowed users to adjust temperature settings and receive notifications when milk was approaching its use-by date, was discontinued in March. The servers were repurposed to host Wickham’s personal Plex media library. Customer emails regarding bricked appliances are automatically forwarded to a folder called “Sadness,” which nobody monitors.
“The notifications feature was genuinely pointless anyway,” Wickham admitted. “You’d get an alert saying ‘Your milk expires tomorrow,’ but you were already at home. Standing in your kitchen. Looking at the milk. The fridge was right there.”
When asked about the security implications of abandoned IoT devices, Wickham looked momentarily confused.
“Security updates? Christ, no. We stopped those about eighteen months ago. I suppose if someone wanted to hack a fridge in Northampton and make it slightly colder, they probably could. Seems like a lot of effort though.”
The company’s flagship model included a touchscreen that could display family calendars, recipes, and targeted advertisements for meal kit delivery services. Seven of these screens have failed. ChillTech no longer manufactures replacement parts.
“Someone called about that last week,” Wickham said. “Nice woman. I think her name was Susan. I told her to try putting a sticky note on it instead. Much more reliable. You can’t remotely brick a sticky note.”
Jennifer Okonkwo, a consumer rights solicitor at Patterson Webb, confirmed that purchasers have limited recourse when manufacturers simply lose interest.
“The law requires products to be fit for purpose for a reasonable length of time. Unfortunately, ‘reasonable’ is open to interpretation, and most judges are still using fridges from 2003 that work perfectly well without an IP address.”
ChillTech is currently developing a smart kettle. Wickham estimates the company will support it for fourteen months, possibly sixteen if they can be bothered.
“The kettle will be brilliant though,” he said. “Absolutely brilliant. For a while.”