[ARCHIVED THREAD] - BOL Chest Freezer Conversion, Solar Panels, Evaluation WORKING GREAT! (Page 3 of 3)
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This thread is incredibly relevant to my interests. The BOL is totally off grid with no option for power hookup. Running a freezer, fridge, and a couple of other things via solar and batteries would be awesome. Also, I have a tiny upright mini freezer that needs to become a fridge for my man cave. It frosts up too badly to use as an extra freezer. |
EXPY37, you state that you are monitoring this setup via IP cameras. Would you care to explain your network setup? I assume that you don't live at your BOL 24x7x365. I would be very interested to know more about your complete power solution. Pics wouldn't hurt either.  |
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EXPY37, you state that you are monitoring this setup via IP cameras. Would you care to explain your network setup? I assume that you don't live at your BOL 24x7x365. I would be very interested to know more about your complete power solution. Pics wouldn't hurt either. T3, here goes. Where the freezers are, 4 224 watt panels, feeding 2 Outbacks, charging 8 L16 batteries, that power a Xantrex 2000 sinewave inverter. One freezer mod'ed with a Johnson control to be a fridge. [Neither are in op at the moment because we don't need them yet, will be soon] [Edit ––-that's incorrect as I later found out... the freezer was still plugged in] Various IP cams incl PTZ ones on a LAN there bridged to a LAN here. I use sort of a red-neck data collection system in that I can point and zoom 2 cams to any of the digital readouts of the various electronics and thermometers and see the data. I use various IP controls to manage loads when the solar output gets low, shed loads from the cams first, and other equipment as necessary. Tranzeo bridges from ebay are used for the links. Everything works great and we can drive down the road 1000 miles away and check stuff out. Next step is to put up an IR illuminator and see better outside at night. With all the stuff running like at the moment, the batterues usually take on about 2.4 kw-hr a day. It's likely I'll have to manage a lot of this stuff carefully when the freezers are turned back on. Going to add more panels hopefully this year so power won't be so much of an issue. |
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This thread is incredibly relevant to my interests. The BOL is totally off grid with no option for power hookup. Running a freezer, fridge, and a couple of other things via solar and batteries would be awesome. Also, I have a tiny upright mini freezer that needs to become a fridge for my man cave. It frosts up too badly to use as an extra freezer. Sounds like a leaky door seal, no defroster function, or low freon. |
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My chest freezer is unplugged and I need to wipe it out to finish cleaning it up. I plan to get another smallish chest freezer and go buy half a cow or so of meat and fill both chest freezers up. I will use them both as freezers for a while. I am back to using a mini fridge as my fridge, still have plenty of space left over in it. The goal is to eventually have a chest freezer that is a fridge, so all the stuff I got to run it as such is going to be kept. The other small chest freezer will be kept as a freezer. If I decide to stock more food I will go with another larger freezer and when it gets closer to empty I could put everything into the smaller chest freezer if it is more efficient to do so. Right now my space considerations make 2 small chest freezers easy to place in the house I rent. One bigger one would be a tough fit. By keeping things smaller I should be able to keep them full easier, just unplug an empty one when empty instead of messing with a big chest freezer that is half empty. I figure this will make rotating meat easy if I just buy 1/4 of a cow to fill the empty little freezer. To some extent I don't know if the smaller chest freezer will run on a smaller generator than a larger chest freezer, but there is a chance. And if a chest freezer dies I did not lose my only chest freezer. I will be buying a different brand than the one I already bought most likely, I want a different one so I can compare numbers. Given time I will get back to having a chest fridge as my fridge but for right now I would rather make use of the freezer as a freezer and buy one more chest freezer instead of buying 2 chest freezers right now. I have learned that I don't want anything with auto defrost. And hopefully for the person with the freezer that frosts up a lot it is just a door seal. I don't know if it would be worth fixing the low freon issue. Then again I don't know what door seals cost these days, sometimes freezers are on sale cheap. |
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I use sort of a red-neck data collection system in that I can point and zoom 2 cams to any of the digital readouts of the various electronics and thermometers and see the data. Something you might want to look at: "1-wire" monitoring. It's a dirt-cheap way to monitor temps (and other things), uses inexpensive sensors and standard cat-5 network cabling. I've got a weather station set up with it, computer controlling it is in the shop, but I can get to it just as easily from the PC in the house. I have a few extra sensors hanging off of it right now to monitor a couple of pens of baby chicks (layers and meat chickens in separate pens), and it's awful nice to be able to "pop in" for a look at the temps without having to go all the way out to the (detached) shop. As long as you've got network connectivity, the remote could just as easily be 1000 m away as in my shop. 1-wire is an interesting concept. Can also control relays, etc. so you could turn things (lights? furnace?) on and off, or a water sensor to watch for broken pipes, or... lotsa potential. This place gives a pretty good intro if you poke around a bit: Hobby Boards |
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Bumping for the guys wanting to set up emergency refrigeration systems.
Connected the units 2 weeks ago and everything is running as far as I can tell... Actually, the freezer was never disconnected and I thought I had pulled the plug on it in January. Seems to be fine. There's a Kilowatz plugged into it and I didn't think to look to see what was used over the winter. |
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I use sort of a red-neck data collection system in that I can point and zoom 2 cams to any of the digital readouts of the various electronics and thermometers and see the data. Something you might want to look at: "1-wire" monitoring. It's a dirt-cheap way to monitor temps (and other things), uses inexpensive sensors and standard cat-5 network cabling. I've got a weather station set up with it, computer controlling it is in the shop, but I can get to it just as easily from the PC in the house. I have a few extra sensors hanging off of it right now to monitor a couple of pens of baby chicks (layers and meat chickens in separate pens), and it's awful nice to be able to "pop in" for a look at the temps without having to go all the way out to the (detached) shop. As long as you've got network connectivity, the remote could just as easily be 1000 m away as in my shop. 1-wire is an interesting concept. Can also control relays, etc. so you could turn things (lights? furnace?) on and off, or a water sensor to watch for broken pipes, or... lotsa potential. This place gives a pretty good intro if you poke around a bit: Hobby Boards Midmo, I just saw your post. Thanks!!! Those are interesting boards. Would you start a thread on your remote wx system or just post in this thread if you would like. |
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I use sort of a red-neck data collection system in that I can point and zoom 2 cams to any of the digital readouts of the various electronics and thermometers and see the data. Something you might want to look at: "1-wire" monitoring. It's a dirt-cheap way to monitor temps (and other things), uses inexpensive sensors and standard cat-5 network cabling. I've got a weather station set up with it, computer controlling it is in the shop, but I can get to it just as easily from the PC in the house. I have a few extra sensors hanging off of it right now to monitor a couple of pens of baby chicks (layers and meat chickens in separate pens), and it's awful nice to be able to "pop in" for a look at the temps without having to go all the way out to the (detached) shop. As long as you've got network connectivity, the remote could just as easily be 1000 m away as in my shop. 1-wire is an interesting concept. Can also control relays, etc. so you could turn things (lights? furnace?) on and off, or a water sensor to watch for broken pipes, or... lotsa potential. This place gives a pretty good intro if you poke around a bit: Hobby Boards Midmo, I just saw your post. Thanks!!! Those are interesting boards. Would you start a thread on your remote wx system or just post in this thread if you would like. That's not a bad idea. I never really thought of the weather station being of interest to SFer's, but what with all the remote BOL's and whatnot I guess it really is. The 1-wire stuff in general has a lot of potential for remote control, and it's also useful around the house/farm/greenhouse/whatever just to make life easier (like watching chick brooder temps, etc.). But Alas! my weather station was laid low by lightning a couple of weeks ago (the tornado that hit St. Louis airport started forming up right over our place) (note: add better surge suppressor to weather station!). I'm only one part away from having it back together again, though, and that'll actually be a good opportunity to post a few pics to a new thread. My weather station is built mainly from Hobby Boards parts: - six-channel master hub - Inspeed Vortex anemometer - Inspeed e-Vane wind direction - RainWise rain gauge - Hobby Boards combo Humidity/Temp/Solar sensor - Hobby Boards barometer The extra sensors used to monitor chicks (or whatever) are just DS18S20 chips (also available from HB) soldered to the end of a piece of cat-5 cable. For software, I'm using: Weather Display It's eighty bucks for the licensed version, but it's pretty powerful. A little clunky; really shows signs of being written by a (bright) guy in his garage and new features pasted on here and there over time, but it works. One thing that's really attractive about 1-wire is that, once you have a physical adapter connected to the computer (the hub serves that role for me), it's fairly easy for even novice programmers to write programs to make the hardware get up and dance. Hobby Boards pushes Tim Bitson's "Weather Toys" book, which I bought and followed for a while. It's a great resource, and can have you building your own weatherstation in no time (including writing the code). I couldn't figure out how to get my particular anemometer working with the Weather Toys examples, though, so I switched over to the Weather Display software above. I'll post a new new thread once I get my replacement hub and can document the (re)assembly. |
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I looked at the Kilowatz connected to the 7 cu ft FREEZER... [Same as the fridge except the thermostat is original and unmodified]
...and from approx Nov until now [early May] there was 4470 hours logged and 59.3 kw used. Now, it's been cold much of that time. 4470hrs/24 hours/day is 186 days. 59,300 watts / 186 days = 320 w/day So the freezer averaged about 320 watts per day during the past 6 months. The temperature in the freezer is kept around -5F. |
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Here is a novel approach he is using the heat of fusion to hold cold
http://bluebarrelgarden.weebly.com/low-power-chest-refrigerator.html |
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Here is a novel approach he is using the heat of fusion to hold cold http://bluebarrelgarden.weebly.com/low-power-chest-refrigerator.html This is a wonderful article and idea!!! Thanks! In essence what the guy is doing is using the latent heat of oil that happpens to have a frrezing point near ideal temp for a refrigerator to bridge the period of no sun and store and release "cold" into the fridge and avoid having to run its compressor. [sorry to the physicists for the ref to 'storing cold' -they're gonna kill me] Read his article carefully to understand 'latent heat'. Note that the Johnson Controls thermostat has a neat feature that is an input to control a programmable setback temperature. You could trigger the setback several easy ways to tell the compressor not to run until the oil has 'melted'. This is a really wonderful way to reduce the amount of batteries required to otherwise store energy and release it at night to run a compressor. The fridge system could be rigged to only run the compressor when the sun was shining hard and use the oil as a 'cold storge' medium and when exhausted, then allow the compressor to run. This is worth discussing some more... |
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Now if we could get variable power compressors (dc) we could do without batteries. Actually a wide range of input voltage inverter, would in some applications eliminate the need for batteries during periods of adequate sunshine. I've been thinking about a design for some time. |
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Now if we could get variable power compressors (dc) we could do without batteries. Actually a wide range of input voltage inverter, would in some applications eliminate the need for batteries during periods of adequate sunshine. I've been thinking about a design for some time. That would be nice but I get a lot of cloud I can't think of a way without some kind of battery storage. |
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Ok I've got a small apartment or dorm sized fridge in my work area
I was very curious as to running it off of solar panels Got a KillAWhatt and plugged it in Uses 100 Watts of power when the compressor is running Filled it seems to turn on 4-6 times a day This is doable Also this is now available http://www.sundanzer.com/BatteryFree.htm Supposedly will run off a single 120 Watt Panel with no batteries or charge controllers It's just a fridge and insanely expensive but that would be an option for people with no grid to connect to |
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Here is a novel approach he is using the heat of fusion to hold cold http://bluebarrelgarden.weebly.com/low-power-chest-refrigerator.html This is a wonderful article and idea!!! Thanks! In essence what the guy is doing is using the latent heat of oil that happpens to have a frrezing point near ideal temp for a refrigerator to bridge the period of no sun and store and release "cold" into the fridge and avoid having to run its compressor. [sorry to the physicists for the ref to 'storing cold' -they're gonna kill me] Read his article carefully to understand 'latent heat'. Note that the Johnson Controls thermostat has a neat feature that is an input to control a programmable setback temperature. You could trigger the setback several easy ways to tell the compressor not to run until the oil has 'melted'. This is a really wonderful way to reduce the amount of batteries required to otherwise store energy and release it at night to run a compressor. The fridge system could be rigged to only run the compressor when the sun was shining hard and use the oil as a 'cold storge' medium and when exhausted, then allow the compressor to run. This is worth discussing some more... Technautics Holding Plate Refrigeration |
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Here is a novel approach he is using the heat of fusion to hold cold http://bluebarrelgarden.weebly.com/low-power-chest-refrigerator.html This is a wonderful article and idea!!! Thanks! In essence what the guy is doing is using the latent heat of oil that happpens to have a frrezing point near ideal temp for a refrigerator to bridge the period of no sun and store and release "cold" into the fridge and avoid having to run its compressor. [sorry to the physicists for the ref to 'storing cold' -they're gonna kill me] Read his article carefully to understand 'latent heat'. Note that the Johnson Controls thermostat has a neat feature that is an input to control a programmable setback temperature. You could trigger the setback several easy ways to tell the compressor not to run until the oil has 'melted'. This is a really wonderful way to reduce the amount of batteries required to otherwise store energy and release it at night to run a compressor. The fridge system could be rigged to only run the compressor when the sun was shining hard and use the oil as a 'cold storge' medium and when exhausted, then allow the compressor to run. This is worth discussing some more... Technautics Holding Plate Refrigeration Interesting... Ski. here's their manual with more details... http://www.technauticsinc.com/manuals/Cool%20Blue%20Manual.pdf |
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I bought a magic chef 4' fridge at a garage sale for 40$, I'm gonna stuff the tiny freezer section with water bottles, and put a sheet of isocyanate insulation
to block it from the fridge and use a 2" 5 or 12v computer fan hooked to a thermostat to blow freezer air into the fridge section till it gets to 38 deg, the water bottles can freeze with out freezing my eggs, I should be able to run the compressor only during sun and let the fridge freewheel at night. it draws 1.25A max. |
| The 4' upright fridge is not suitable for solar operation, I put 5 liters of water in the freezer section and ran it till it was a steady 32 degrees after letting it sit for 1/2 hour, after 2 hours it was up to 40 degrees, not enough insulation and no way to add more as it uses the outside of the case as the condenser. |