Eliminating the fridge

[stovie]

Right now I'm getting ready to move to TN in about two to three weeks. I'm planning on having it to were I don't have a fridge in my house and use other means to preserve my food. One of the main things I'm looking into is smoking my meat then vacuum sealing it to preserve it without using a fridge. Another thing I've been looking into is that if you use mineral oil on the outside of eggs they can be kept on the table for months at a time without going bad. I'm also looking into bottling my fruits and vegetables to preserve them also. You can cook a big pot of stew and bottle it, and if done right you can put it in single serving size bottles so that you just through it into a pot to reheat then eat it. Too much of what we do now is to just through food in the fridge to preserve it but if a little extra time was given I believe everything could be preserved for months or even years with no refrigeratoration at all.

[Frank Lee]

No milk, no ice cream, no ice cubes.

[Daox]

I'm not sure of your reasoning for wanting to get rid of the fridge, but you might want to check this out. One of the users on ecomodder converted a mini-freezer to a fridge. Its power consumption is very low, and he didn't even use a nice freezer, just a cheapo inefficient one he got on craigslist for $25. IIRC it uses ~350 wh/day versus a new 'efficient' full size refrigerator's 1kwh/day. If you got an efficient mini-freezer it would be lower.

AC_Hacker's Hasty Freezer Conversion - EcoRenovator

[jamesqf]

Unfortunately, if your goal is to save energy, you'll discover that properly canning things takes plenty of energy, probably more than keeping them in an energy-efficient refrigerator, especially for short-term storage. You have to heat the jars to boiling in a water bath, and keep them there long enough to kill bacteria.

In fact, I do just the opposite: I like to make jams from my excess fruit, but I keep the jars of jam in the freezer just to be on the safe side.

[stovie]

It won't cost me more to bottle my food because I'm just simply not buying a new fridge. It's not a matter of removing it it's a matter of not forking out the money to buy it.

My main source of fuel in TN is going to be wood so it won't cost me much there either. I'm also looking into stuff like wood gasification to power a small generator that's grid-tied.

I'm going to need to get a fridge at some point though, but I'm wanting to get a propane fridge and see about running it off of a friction heater and a gravity motor. If I can get it to work it will cool the fridge with no power at all.

I had a gravity motor working somewhat I few years ago, it wasn't anything big but just something for testing the concept. From what I understand a friction heater just needs to be spun to produce a good quantity of heat.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by stovie

I'm going to need to get a fridge at some point though, but I'm wanting to get a propane fridge and see about running it off of a friction heater and a gravity motor. If I can get it to work it will cool the fridge with no power at all.

Well, if you do get your perpetual motion machine to work, be sure to let the world know :-)

Also, friction is about the least efficient way of creating heat that I can think of offhand. Assuming that you can get your "gravity motor" to work, you'd be far more efficient replacing the electric motor in a fridge with it. Or save some work, and just buy a few PV panels to run the fridge &c.

[jakobnev]

You could modify a propane fridge to use wood or solar heat, without having to violate the laws of physics.

[elhigh]

I'm hoping that you will expound at length on your gravity motor. Not in this part of the forum of course, that's for a different heading entirely.

I live in TN and can see how you might want an off-grid option. We have some very rugged, very rural parts a mere half-hour's drive away from metro areas, and running power to them could get very expensive.

Humans got by almost entirely without refrigeration a mere 100 years ago, so what you're trying to achieve isn't too far a reach. It WILL require a significant expenditure of time and effort on your part however, which is almost entirely what the refrigerator supplants in its everyday function, though people don't usually realize it.

Then again, people used to die of dysentery and that doesn't happen that much anymore in the industrialized world.

If off-grid living is your goal you may still want refrigeration, if only for the occasional cold drink. To that end you could achieve a lot with a couple of solar panels and a direct-driven DC compressor in a homemade icebox.

One of these little fellows could meet your modest refrigeration needs nicely. They're designed to take 24v DC directly, so I think you could run them straight off a pair of solar panels. Build up your coils into a homebrew, heavily insulated cabinet and you would be good to go.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

In a properly-built cabinet, the principles of convection already provide some cooling effect. But I still wouldn't feel confident to get rid of a conventional fridge.

[roosterk0031]

If you don't need ice just use a 12v dc cooler that has those dis-similar metal things that I can't ever remember the name of. Solar panel, 12v battery and cooler.

Edit: Peltier effect, probably not that hard to make, put the waste heat into a water heater or space heating.