Creating a Low Power Fridge

[matapan]

If you live in an area that is cold all winter long, does the concept of having an appliance to keep food cold using lots of electricity during the winter, when you spend loads of money to heat your house strike you as being silly?

 

It did for me. I often thought about what it would take to keep food outside the house, perhaps just outside on the balcony safe.

 

Using ISY and the Weatherbug module, one could probably devise the logic of how to maintain a fairly consistent environment for food refrigerated outside. Temperature gets too low, open a valve to let air from the house into the chamber. Temperature gets too high, send a notification to the user about the temperature getting too high, or have a refrigeration assist device kick in. Same principle for humidity.

[aLf]

With this idea, I could really utilize my Dakota products better by alerting me to when the bears come for my food.

[tonks001]

Wow, thanks for sharing this info. I'll keep this in mind, and I think it will really help me a lot.

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[apostolakisl]

How about a tube that runs a loop of antifreeze from outside your house to inside your fridge. You could have an evaporator like set up for heat exchange inside the fridge and one on the outside and a small cirulating pump to move the fluid. When the temp ouside hits a certain level, the pump can cirulate the antifreeze between inside and outside dumping the heat from inside your fridge to the cold outdoors. You could have a fan blow air over the heat exchanger or just let it work by convection. You would lose a little space in your fridge though. You probably would need a thermometer in the fridge as well to shut the circulating pump off just in case it works so well that it makes your fridge too cold.

 

I am sure this would work if you sized your heat exchanger and circulating pumps properly. The one question I have, however, is just how much it would save. Since a running refridgerator in the end turns electricity to heat and in the winter you need heat anyway. It is certainly not the most efficient way to heat your house, but I don't know just how much worse than your furnace it actually is.