Refrigeration Innovation: A Cooler Idea to Save Energy
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Nature & Environment
Posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 4:13 am by dpacheco
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You can make a refrigerator that consumes only 10% of the energy of your current model, runs almost silently, and stores the same amount of food. And you can do it with only minor alterations to an energy-hogging chest freezer. Australian inventor Tom Chalko shows you how.
With all the recent advancements in energy efficient appliances and electronics, manufacturers have been lauded for their hard work at reducing the energy impacts of a typical household.And it is deserved. Take for instance the refrigerator. Just 20 years ago a typical fridge would burn 800 or more kWh’s per year. 10 years ago that got cut down to 500. Not 350 kWh’s is par for the course.But every now and then, someone comes along with an innovation so simple, and so brilliant (in that hidden under your nose kind of way) that it makes all the hard-earned advancements seem moot. For the refrigerator, that someone is Australian inventor Tom Chalko (PDF).He had the idea to convert an old chest freezer (a known energy hog) into a SUPER high-efficiency refrigerator using nothing more than an internal thermostat hacked into the compressor. The result is a almost nonexistent 100 watts per day (the equivalent of a 100 watt light bulb going for an hour). That is approximately 1/10th the energy use of the most energy efficient (standard size) refrigerator currently on the market.
August 24th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
We did this, using Tom’s instructions. It works like a charm, though when the temperatures rise over 85 degrees Fahrenheit, you’ll find that the energy use is a bit higher than 100 watts per day.
This is a VERY easy modification to make, if you have basic soldering skills. Once the unit is put together, all you need to do is plug your refrigerator into it, and plug it into the wall, then play around with the temperature setting until you find the one that keeps your milk from freezing. ;-)
It saves a boatload of money vs buying an “official” brand off-grid refrigerator - even the ones that are nothing but modified chest freezers.
Our experience:
We used the most efficient, small frigidaire model and hooked it up to a switched outlet. We have only two 100 watt solar panels and 4 batteries, so we needed more control over when its compressor ran. The compressor’s energy consumption spikes significantly when it first kicks in, so you need to be aware of that if you run with a low-powered inverter - be sure not to be running other things, like a microwave or water pump when the refrigerator kicks in.
If he had it to do over again, my husband would have eliminated the battery from the circuit, and would run the thermostat unit off the main batteries, so we wouldn’t have to keep track of the charge level of an extra battery that is not charged automatically by the charge controller. This wouldn’t have been an issue if we’d not used a switched outlet.
As a fairly short person, I found it hard to reach things in the bottom of the refrigerator, and impossible to clean the kids’ spills, so those tasks fell to my husband (not that I mind, LOL). I recommend storing the items you use least often in the bottom, with frequently used items in baskets at the top. Putting liquids in glass bottles in the bottom also helps to increase efficiency, since the thermal mass of the glass and liquid retains the cold, and helps restore an even temperature more rapidly when you close the fridge.
As much as we love saving a ton of energy, due to space limitations in our tiny cabin, we’re likely to switch to a particular model of less-efficient (but still highly efficient) apartment sized refrigerator. It won’t save as much as the chest freezer solution, but will still be a significant improvement over a regular refrigerator, and will cost far less than a propane or other off-grid refrigerator. It will also enable us to move the refrigerator further from the woodstove….
September 12th, 2009 at 7:27 am
This seems just too good to be true. I just can’t see that with all the millions of dollars/pounds whatever, at their disposal, that the big fridge/freezer manufacturers would have overlooked something that on the face of it is a relatively simple concept.
If this is for real, it’s fantastic for the environment. We need more of this type of ingenuity to help us save our planet. It just makes me realise how much power that we are wasting needlessly.
I hope he makes a killing out of this, It is well merited.