DIY - Ambient Air Fridge

[NoCO2]

I noticed a lot of the members on this site are from Canada, or other cold regions of the wold and I thought this article would be great for some of you guys to help save some money from getting swallowed up by the greedy electric company.

Now, I'm sorry if this should have gone in saving at home, but it's a DIY so I figured I would try here first, but this article is from thedailygreen.com and they show you how to make a fridge from some very simple materials that doesn't require any electricity to keep your food cold.

http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-h...gerator-460215

[MetroMPG]

That's cool. It's one of those things I've often wondered about, but this is the first time I've seen it done.

[boxchain]

That's awesome. Totally useless to me, but awesome.

[Who]

...his AAF holds at about 40. That's just right for beer, the nutritious food he lovingly provides to his family.

LMAO

[bennelson]

Good application.

Rigging up two fans with a thermostat seems like a fairly easy operation.

A small version of this fridge could also be rigged up to a kitchen window. I wouldn't want to loose the light, but I was at a friend's Chicago town house last weekend, and the only view out their kitchen window was the side of the next building anyways.

If more ideas like this were integrated directly into the original building design, it would be done nicer, more convenient, and less expensively.

In my area, many older houses have a small door in the wall right off the kitchen where the milkman would leave the milk. A door on the outside opened for the milkman to drop it off, and a door on the inside opened for the householder to grab the milk. This "milk-door" would be a great place to build an ecofriendly mini-fridge!

[metroschultz]

I would stick items outside when I lived farther north, but I never considered making a box and using cold ambient air for refrigeration.
That was just way too Cool.
If I were to try that in my current location I would just be using it to turn my milk into yogurt. Slowly.
There is, however, A cookbook for us here in the south so we-uns can use the heat from the sun and the interior of a dark colored car to prepare dinner.
I've never tried it.
I'm afraid of Botulism.
I have in the past used the heat from my exhaust to cook while on a trip. The cookbook is titled, ------your gonna love this,

"Manifold Destiny"
It worked well in my big V8.
I wonder how it will work in my not so big I3?
Abba goo dai
S.

[bennelson]

On the back of boxed foods, the instructions usually have slightly different preperation directions for "high altitude".

Maybe Manifold Destiny recipies should have "if driving a Metro, please cook for an additional 100 miles...."

[Who]

On a long distance cycling race we made "on the block hot dogs". Just wrap them in tin foil and leave them on a hot spot on top of the motor somewhere that they are secure and then pop the hood open 30 minutes later (YTMV).

The AAF is interesting to contrast with solar ovens that are built along the same lines as an exterior attachment. In some ways, it really requires some inefficiencies in the buildings thermal envelope to operate. I guess the big question would be does the BTUs it needs at lower temps require much less energy than the compressor.

I still like root cellars, although they are pretty well purely rural...

[Ryland]

A few years back I was talking to the owner of Sunfrost (super efficnet fridges) about heat pipes and he said they already tried that heat pipe idea in a fridge! that they had made a number of fridges that used them! and it worked great, that it could be a retro fit to an exsisting fridge and with only a 1/2" hole thru the wall and no electricity to make it work, but there isn't any demand for fridges that use zero energy, partly because no one understood the idea, but as he said, it works really well.

[Who]

Yanno... if you had thermal solar cells and a near perfectly insulated basement storage tank that covered 1000 square feet and was a full 8' tall that would get you 500,000 pounds of water. Every 2 degrees of water you could store it above say 68° means a million stored BTUs.

If you could get the water up over 100°, that's a ΔT OF 32° (assuming 68° indoor air temp) OR 16 million BTUs. I have a pretty average house and used 66 million BTUs, roughly 4x as much as what that could store. I could see it easily doing half the season!


...but just imagine if it were to ever freeze in a prolonged power outage. Yikes!