Self-Sufficiency

Had to clean out my fridge today, while that’s not such a big deal to most, to me it’s (almost) a pleasure to do because of the kind of fridge I have. Living off-grid, using solar panels and batteries, on limited power, one looks for ways to use as little power as possible, one of the things I found that really ate up my power was my little, tiny dorm sized cube refrigerator, the kind that opened in front, had a tiny tiny tiny freezer, in fact I couldn’t even put a full size ice tray inside it, they make micro-ice cube trays.

Most of the time I didn’t even plug in that cube fridge, we just learned to live without refrigeration for the most part, honestly it just sucked up too much precious photon juice from my system. So on the odd occasion when I brought home a gallon of milk, or some meat that didn’t get used up quickly, I would plug in the darned thing and wonder how much time it was taking from my surfing the internet…

With the cube fridge, it ran 15+ minutes at a time, a couple of times an hour, more if I actually opened the door, think about it, when you open the door on a standard fridge, all the cold air drops out of the box onto your feet, feels good for the moment but the compressor kicks in immediately to compensate for all that lost cold air.

I’ll not go into detail about this because I’ve written about it (in detail) in previous posts here… this is really just a follow up on how well I like (love) my chest freezer-fridge conversion. :)…