One of the challenges of off-grid living is how to power a fridge. This blog post looks at our experiment on hacking a freezer to work as a fridge that uses very little energy.
Although a fridge takes relatively low power (around 50 Watts) it needs to be plugged in all day. A fridge uses power to get down to the set temperature and then switches off. Assuming that a typical fridge is powered for 8 hours out of every 24 hours, the total energy consumed by a fridge is around is 50 Watts x 8 hours = 400 Watt Hours a day.
12 V fridges are handy, but are quite expensive - costing hundreds of pounds.
A 100 Ah leisure battery has 50 % of 100 A x 12 = 600 Watt hours of energy stored - so would just about be enough to keep the fridge powered.
An often suggested way of running a fridge at much lower power is to hack a freezer to run as a fridge. Freezers generally have much better insulation than fridges and so use a lot less energy.
Fridges keep the inside temperature below 5 deg C and freezers keep the inside temperature below - 15 deg C. The device shown below can be programmed to switch the freezer off when the temperature gets down to around 4 deg C and come back on again when the temperature rises above 5 deg C.
No comments:
Post a Comment