Appropriate Technology, Sustainable Living
Sunseed has a low impact fridge!
This summer two French interns, Benjamin and Sylvain, joined us in the AT department. Their project was to design and experiment with a low impact fridge for Sunseed.
The fridge design that they worked with was called “refrigerateur gigogne” and it aims to conserve food longer and fresher without using electricity. Felix Trombe was the first to experiment with this model in 1962 in France. He demonstrated that it is possible to produce a cold space for food and drink that is simple and electricity free.
As it doesn´t use electricity, this fridge is perfectly suitable for an off grid area such as Sunseed. Only a few examples of constructions are available on the Internet and they do not include the storage of food, only the cooling process. Therefore the building of this fridge at Sunseed is very experimental.
The temperature is cold enough to keep the food fresh inside the fridge and it is important that the temperature doesn´t rise during the day. Therefore, the way of using the fridge is essentialy this:
– Put the fridge outside during the night in a place without trees, buildings or anything that can shade or reflect the heat radiation from the fridge.
-Early in the morning (preferably before the rising of the sun)put the lid on the top and move it into a fresh place to keep the cold produced during the night.
Well done to Benjamin and Sylvain with their internship, and the maintenance team of Diego and Mirko.
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