Read as your appliances may become useless

[Straight Shooter]

I am prepping for no power, I am lucky enough to have streams running through my land, I will be sinking a few containers with screw tops into the stream beds , and camouflaging the tops. I have tested the idea using butter , milk , and some veggies , without having any problems at all, got the idea from Kenneth Eames post on BOG BUTTER ......p.s. thanks Kenneth !

[clv101]

Dynamic Demand in devices like fridges with high thermal inertial is a great idea. The 'Big Brother' and state control mentioned in the usual areas of the media are red herrings. These concerns may apply to smart metres, but not dynamic demand.

Key points about Dynamic Demand:
The energy available at the socket is totally unaffected - it's always on just as it is now.
The coolness of your milk is unaffected - it'll be kept just as cool as it is now.
The benefit is that it makes it easier for the grid to deliver that energy service.
It's not about reducing overall electricity use, it is about generating electricity more efficiently and reducing the chance of blackout.
No information travels from the appliance back into the grid, the appliance simple reads the instantaneous grid status.

Sizewell B failed in 2008, sparking large scale black outs. In theory, if 20 million fridges and freezers could have come off-line for a few minutes, alternative supply could have been brought on-line and no one would even have noticed. That's an extreme case, but the theory is sound and it's going to become more important in time.

[PaulandNell]

If anyone is worried about keeping food cool off-the-grid or post-SHTF, one solution is to get a chest freezer and convert it to a fridge. There are conversion kits available on ebay for about £25.00.

A chest freezer has two advantages over a fridge:
- The lid opens from the top, keeping the (heavy) cool air inside, and
- They are much better insulated than the best fridges.

What this means is that if you run a freezer at the temperature of a fridge (around +4 degrees), instead of at the temperature of a freezer (-18 degrees), it costs a tiny amount of energy to run. This means you can run one with a very modest solar PV array and battery, or something like a small marine wind turbine.

I read that an A-rated chest freezer, running as a fridge, consumes only around 0.15 kWh per day. That's around 12 Ah at 12 V, meaning a 100 Ah battery would keep you going for a week without any charging.

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Personally, my preps involve not using a fridge post-SHTF.

Thanks T, thats a good tip.. I remember years ago when my mum got our first fridge mainly because she kept the milk bottles out at the front door and we were always tripping over them. We thought it was a good thing to have, but years before no one had fridges and used all sorts of ideas to keep food cool, we should learn to adapt more and keepsharing our ideas and tips.

[Binnie]

Dynamic Demand in devices like fridges with high thermal inertial is a great idea. The 'Big Brother' and state control mentioned in the usual areas of the media are red herrings. These concerns may apply to smart metres, but not dynamic demand.

Key points about Dynamic Demand:
The energy available at the socket is totally unaffected - it's always on just as it is now.
The coolness of your milk is unaffected - it'll be kept just as cool as it is now.
The benefit is that it makes it easier for the grid to deliver that energy service.
It's not about reducing overall electricity use, it is about generating electricity more efficiently and reducing the chance of blackout.
No information travels from the appliance back into the grid, the appliance simple reads the instantaneous grid status.

Sizewell B failed in 2008, sparking large scale black outs. In theory, if 20 million fridges and freezers could have come off-line for a few minutes, alternative supply could have been brought on-line and no one would even have noticed. That's an extreme case, but the theory is sound and it's going to become more important in time.

But as a customer, surely YOU tell THEM when you want to use the fridge? not the other way round!!!

[clv101]

No Binnie, the fridge will still work in the same way in that your milk will still be cool. Remember what we want is the energy service of cool milk, this we will still receive with a Dynamic Demand enabled fridge. The difference is that the fridge will do its job of cooling your milk with consideration of the grid status, it will never fail to keep to milk cool thanks to the thermal inertia.

Say you've set the fridge to 4C. The fridge interprets this as no colder than 3C and no warmer than 5C (for example). Without DD the fridge will come on when it warms to 5C and stay on until it cools to 3C. With DD, the fridge will continuously check the grid status and come on when when grid load is light and delay coming on when grid load is heavy, however it will still respect the 3C and 5C thresholds and the user notices no difference. All that's happened is that the precise timing of load has been shifted a few minutes, this increases grid efficiency and reduces the chance of blackout.