(4 May 2013, 21:58)Tarrel Wrote: 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.
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.
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