Using high efficiency technology and making a few uncomplicated lifestyle changes can have a large impact on your daily vigor use and make living off the grid much more feasible. One of the technological improvements I have made that I am most happy with is my home modified high efficiency refrigerator. This refrigerator has been my only refrigerator for 4 years and has operated flawlessly with extremely low power consumption. In this article, I will frame my reasons for the convert and elucidate how to make the conversion so you can try it out yourself.
My motivation to experiment with a new refrigeration strategy came from my sense with my old refrigerator. It was a fairly tasteless style of stand up refrigerator with a freezer section on the top third and it consumed an outrageous total of 5-6kwh a day! The major flaw of the tasteless refrigerator is that the doors are placed on the side. A proper construct should take into account the fact that cold air is more dense that the rest of the air in your house and will drop in height when given the chance. Well, the cold air in your refrigerator gets that occasion every time you open the door. As you gaze inside to elect your next meal, all of the cold air rushes out by your feet and is supplanted by warmer air from your living space that will now need to be cooled. Also, the magnetic door seals, no matter how air tight when they are new, will inevitably construct imperfections and allow the cooled air to seep through constantly.
Four Door Refrigerator
An efficient refrigerator construct must start with a well insulated chest style container. If you don't want to build your own, you're in luck because any chest freezer will work wonderfully. Cool air from within the unit will not leak because the door is placed on the top. Also, each time you open the refrigerator to grab something to eat the cool air will stay inside and will not need to be recooled as soon as you shut the door.
The unavoidable question with using a chest freezer as your refrigerator is that its thermostat is set for a climatic characteristic range far to low. To solve this problem, it is needful to setup another circuit with a thermostat and relay switch to make sure the climatic characteristic stays at about 4 degrees Celsius. Basically, this circuit must turn on the freezer compressor when the climatic characteristic rises above 4 C and turn off when the climatic characteristic drops below 4 C. The simplest selection would be to find a cooling line voltage thermostat with a range of 0 - 10 C but I couldn't find one so I had to use a quarterly heating thermostat with a range of about 0-30 C. If I set this heating thermostat at 4 C and hooked it up to my chest freezer, it would turn on the freezer when the climatic characteristic dropped below 4 C and this would only make it colder or if the climatic characteristic was above 4 C the thermostat would never turn on the freezer! More research was needed to solve this problem.
The clarification I found was the Spdt relay switch. An Spdt relay uses the electromagnetic force of a coil to control a switch in another circuit and this relay allowed me to use a heating thermostat to correctly control freezer compressor. When the heating thermostat reads a climatic characteristic of 3 C it will close its circuit and this will allow current through the relay coil and flip the switch to the off position. When the heating thermostat reads a climatic characteristic of 5 C, it will open its circuit and this will stop the current through the relay coil and close the other circuit thereby turning on the freezer compressor.
In order to get wires to the new thermostat inside the refrigerator, I opened up the drain plug at the lowest corner of the unit. The hole is taped shut with duct tape inside. The relay switch is just tucked away in the middle of the wall and the refrigerator for now. I'll build a nice circuit box for it at some point.
I can keep all of the same foods in this chest refrigerator but the assosication has changed because the door is on the top. I found two Rubbermaid bins that fit the large warehouse area quite well. I stack one on top of the other and just pull out the top one when I want to get at stuff in the bottom. I view this process might get annoying but I found that I rarely have to do this if I just put my long term warehouse items in the lowest holder and all of my daily used items in the top container.
Since the main presuppose for this project was vigor conservation I should fill you in on the execution of this chest refrigerator. I plugged my vigor metre into this unit for a few days and found that it used about 200wh a day on average. That's only 2 cents a day of electricity and a huge drop from my old vigor sucking model that used 5-6 kwh a day. The most efficient refrigerators you can buy new today use around 1 kwh a day and this construct uses only one fifth of that!
This contrast in power consumption only means a few dollars a year on my power bill if you are already hooked up to the grid but if you consider buying solar panels to power your household technology then this contrast in vigor consumption means spending thousands of dollars less on solar panels so the uncomplicated convert to a chest refrigerator makes living off the grid much more viable.
How to Make Your Own High Efficiency Refrigerator
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