Refrigeration without electricity

[kola]

I have plans to put in a old fashioned root cellar. A 10x8 hole in the ground 8 foot deep will keep evrerything supercool.
Mother Earth News mag has some great plans and it is quite simple. (i can even store my pipe tobacco down there too )

kola

[MaineShark]

...hooked to a childs see-saw and extremely efficient... 

Um, okay...?  There's humor there?

...folks came in,... installed electric pumps and diesel generators.... fuck'n bastards...   

More the "ripped out the pumps" part.  Installing a second system is one thing, but when the UN jerks go in, they like to destroy what's there, first, so that the folks in the village will be entirely dependent upon keeping the UN happy in order to get their diesel ration and repair parts.

Joe

[Free libertarian]

   The two clay pot, water evaporation thing is pretty cool, I've read about it but haven't made one.

In NH using the outdoors works pretty well from November to April.  If you unplug a small fridge and stick three or four frozen water jugs in it it will keep food from spoiling. Obviously you need to rotate thawing jugs out with freshly frozen ones.   Also keeping your fridge away from your stove helps too.
  I've often wondered how cutting a hole in the exterior wall and sticking the fridge outside would do...access door on the inside, food compartment chilling in the breeze.  Might not work in every neighborhood though due to esthetics.

If you have a shaded cool stream, and a weighted plastic laundry basket that can do as a "spring house" even into the summer.   

  Electric fridges are a pretty big energy draw for off the grid so I was making a "refrigerator" from a small chest freezer that I added extra insulation to on the outside and readjusted the thermostat (an external thermostat) so it kicked on about 40* instead of the normal freezer temp.  This project got shelved when I finally sprung for a propane fridge.  This type of converted freezer to "fridge"  would use alot less electricity than a normal upright fridge. There are articles online how to do this.

  A chest freezer using the frozen water jug trick will work better than an upright fridge as a stop gap since all the "cold" doesn't leak out every time you open the door.

I have an idea with increasing costs of combustible fuel and electricity alot of "old time" things will start to make a comeback, at least for some of us who are into that low tech kind of stuff. 

[MaineShark]

Absorption chillers are another option.  This is the original powered-refrigeration system.

The simple ones use ammonia and water in a sealed system.  Think of two spheres, connected by an inverted U.  You heat one end over a fire (or other heat source) and run the other end under cool water.  Then you hang the system in your icebox (a chest freezer would work, with a notch cut at the top for the U pipe).  There are metering devices in the pipe that control the rate at which ammonia is absorbed by the water in the other ball.  At the end of the cycle (a full day), you do the heat trick again, separating the ammonia and water.

I know I have plans for that sort, somewhere.  If anyone is actually interested in trying to build one, I can help with pipe fittings and such.

The fancier models use a continuous flow principle, so you don't have to periodically recharge them.  The propane-fueled refrigerators are absorption units.

Industrial models tend to use a lithium-bromide process.  There are some European absorption chillers for residential-sized needs that I'm hoping to find a way to import.

The heat source for operation can actually be a solar-thermal collector, so with a small PV panel to run the electronics and the pumps, the system can be fuel-free.

Joe

[dalebert]

Industrial models tend to use a lithium-bromide process.

Some navy boats have those. They're REALLY sensitive as I understand. They can be high maintenance. Prolly that's the reason why they're industrial. They can have experts on hand to fiddle with them when they stop working.

[KBCraig]

   The two clay pot, water evaporation thing is pretty cool, I've read about it but haven't made one.

I have a terracotta "wine chiller" that uses evaporation. It's a clay pot shaped to hold a wine bottle; soak it in water for several hours, plunk in a bottle of vino, wait a few hours, and if the conditions are right, you have "cooled" --not exactly "chilled"-- wine.

We use it to hold kitchen spoons and spatulas. 

[MaineShark]

Industrial models tend to use a lithium-bromide process.

Some navy boats have those. They're REALLY sensitive as I understand. They can be high maintenance. Prolly that's the reason why they're industrial. They can have experts on hand to fiddle with them when they stop working.

Some of them.  There are European models that are realistic for large residences.

Another interesting thing we can do with refrigeration is to put that heat to use.  Your fridge pumps heat from the storage compartment to the coil on the back.  In situations where saving energy can justify the investment (eg, off-grid, or commercial installs) we install a coil that pre-heats your domestic water using the heat that is being removed from the inside of the refrigerator (or from the building, in the case of central A/C).  This is done on a number of commercial buildings.

There's a train station in one of the European countries that needs to be cooled almost all of the year, due to the body heat of the crowds and the heat produced by the trains.  So they pump the heat into the office building next door, instead of just dumping it out into the air.

Lots of things that we can do, if we plan for it.

Joe

[Lloyd Danforth]

The top of the fridge is a good place to raise bread

[NJLiberty]

   I've often wondered how cutting a hole in the exterior wall and sticking the fridge outside would do...access door on the inside, food compartment chilling in the breeze.  Might not work in every neighborhood though due to esthetics.

A lot of old farmhouses had a pantry that was open to the outside. It was a very effective method for keeping things cold during the colder months.

A spring house is a good idea, as is storing things in a cold water stream.

We had an ice house at my grandmother's house. It hadn't been used for ice in 20 years when I was there, but it was still the coolest place there was during the summer. It had two thick walls that had been packed with sawdust as insulation. It had a very thick insulated door as well. The ice was cut from a local lake in the winter and stored in the ice house in large blocks with saw dust between them. The ice in that house lasted until the following winter time.

My grandmother stored all her canned goods, the homemade soda, and such in the root cellar underneath the shanty. It had a dirt floor, and was always nice and cool...another good place for us to hide out during NJ's hot humid summers.

George