Chillin' and Freezing Your Assets

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I'm going for the largely technical/pictorial today. All this heavy socializing (a once a week complete joy for two weeks in a row now!) has left me severely adrenalin-depleted. Yeah, pretty darned sad when you think of it. So I am slipping off into the technical end of off-the-grid living, something that I can do without the emotion I need to address the intrinsic rewards of this lifestyle. Also, I have to admit, I am very saddened by Fat Hairy's loss of his dad yesterday. I don't accept sad events happening to good people very well at all.
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Above is our first big dollar purchase early on. This is an 18 cubic foot propane-fired refrigerator made by Crystal Cold. Compared to the usual electric refrigerator, it was pricey at $2500 (without shipping) but going for the extra capacity was money WELL spent for a situation where you might not be able to access civilization for a few weeks at a time. The unit has preformed very well and dependably in these past two years (touch wood as always). Other than having to vacuum the collected debris from the rear cooling coils once to get it restarted, it has performed very well. Mind you, defrosting is a necessary function every couple of months. I know, NOBODY has had to defrost a refrigerator in the last 20 years but, still, you take what you can get in this limited field of offerings. I took this photo during a defrost and you can see the Coleman cooler to the right which is keeping the vacated contents somewhat cool during the process.

Over the very top shelf within the cabinet, you can see the radiation coils which provide the cooling. These will form a thick frost which needs to be removed occasionally. You can slow down the defrosting ritual considerably by taking care not to store items which readily release moisture. Our dry desert climate also helps as far as minimizing introduced outside moisture collecting on the coils. Fuel consumption will go up and adjustment of the cooling controls will need to be continually tweaked if you ignore the defrosting task. Still, this is not an utterly daunting task.

I normally drape a heavy blanket over the door to keep the door shelf contents cool in place rather than find more cooler space for them but I removed the blanket for this photo. This unit is very reasonable on gas consumption when properly serviced. It is also available pre-jetted for natural gas use but switching the jets from one to the other fuel is easy enough later on.
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The new freezer arrives! Plenty of supervisors! Above, Slim, Sammy, Chase and Big Dog all supervise Mark approaching the unloading task in the skid-steer.

The gift of that elk carcass forced this issue on the postponed desire to have a full freezer here. It's yet another pricey addition at $2375 without shipping but we are looking beyond the one year cost of storing a processed elk to the new prospect of being able to stock up on truly exceptional sales of meat and dairy products and having these food items available should we become stranded longer than normal. Given how many millions of dollars worth of food has spoiled during severe ice storms and subsequent power outages in the last decade, this is an option that even on-the-grid dwellers should consider.
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. Temporary home of the new freezer. It spent the first few days out on the hydraulic lift gate of the 45' moving trailer but it became apparent that being under the scrutiny of the returning Spring sun, the gas consumption would increase dramatically so we moved it into the trailer. The shelter within will provide temporary shading but we hope to juggle a space for it inside the more insulated main buildings as soon as possible. The other incentive for moving it inside (although the manufacturer said that many people keep these units outside) was that the strong winds of late continually blew out the pilot light. .
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While it poses a bit of an obstacle in this new setting within the moving trailer, we are willing to sacrifice trailer content access for shading until the situation changes. I would say that patience has become our number one necessary lesson in moving off-the-grid. Anyone driven to immediate gratification will not psychologically survive for very long out here unless they have an unlimited budget - and that rules out 98% of us right up front. Note that the cooling coils are situated on each side of the unit as opposed to the rear (you will read more about that curious feature below).
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.What is so very different about this freezer when compared to our gas refrigerator (or even the standard electric models) is that the cooling coils are not located at the rear. From the photo above, you can see that the designers obviously retrofitted a standard electrically cooled cabinet - there is a large open area below the inner cabinet which originally housed the electric compressor unit. This space is wasted and empty since the gas tank powers TWO separate cooling systems, one on each SIDE of the cabinet.

The glory in having two independent cooling systems (one on each side) is that you can run just one side if the freezer is operating in an fairly sheltered and cool environment. We will be running on one side only and saving considerable fuel until the summer weather hits.

Immediate drawbacks? These appliances are a truck-freight item and it is required that you inspect the item at the shipping dock before loading it and noting any damage if you want to make a damage claim. Given the very rough 2 hour ride from the dock to the Rat, we didn't want to clip the steel banding and disturb the protective shipping wrap. In both the case of the refrigerator and the freezer, we later found hidden freight damages not apparent at the dock. You can see some of the damage in the middle photo of the freezer; a deep ding in the coil cover about ten inches down from the top of the side cooling system cover. It was just a chance we took and lost - had we uncrated the unit for inspection at the dock, it might have sustained worse damage on the trip in.
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