Quote:
Originally Posted by AC_Hacker
* Do we need a refrigerator all the time? This depends on local weather, but in my part of the world, winter time is six months long and rarely freezes. A metal box on the back porch works perfectly as a refrigerator. No power required, no moving parts. I'm the only person I know that uses this. When I tell people about this, they think I'm strange...I think they're strange. But without resorting to technology, I have reduced my refrigeration load by half.
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I thought about doing the same. Before I got married we had a north-facing porch and I sometimes put stuff from the freezer out there when it was
really cold. That was a good time for defrosting the freezer (our fridge and freezer were two separate units). Since we only opened the freezer once every few days this wasn't a problem. Using the balcony instead of a refrigerator wouldn't be that easy: first, the balcony was two floors higher than the kitchen. Second, I guessed that I would waste more heat opening and closing the balcony door a few times a day than what the fridge was actually using (it was the most efficient we could get then).
Now I live at my wife's and we also have a north-facing balcony, but the fridge and freezer are one unit, so whether one is empty doesn't make much of a difference. It's very efficient (rated A+, around 0.65kWh/day, compared to 1.25kWh for the previous unit), but gets opened quite often (see: Dad-in-law
).
Back to GSHP, I remembered another rule I came across somewhere: For every square meter of area of the building you want to heat there should be 4 meters of underground piping. Also, laying the pipes about 1.5 meters below the surface is supposed to be slightly better than deep drilling, under the assumption that that area of ground gets a lot of sun. 1.5 meters is about how deep the sun's heat penetrates, but is also the the freezing depth. Of course, the difference isn't that big, but if you have a sunny southern slope next to the house, it'd be sin to start drilling instead of digging.