Power and Refrigeration

My solar power system has stood me in good stead for three years now, though the battery pack is fading. If the sun doesn’t shine I may not have power the next day. I had to replace both the inverter and the controller along the way. I got the exact same components as I had before, but when the inverter died again, after a little over two years, I decided to look for something better. My freezer had also died the month before causing me to question why. My old inverter was a modified sine wave model and this might have had an impact on shortening the life of the freezer, so I went looking for a pure sine wave model among all the cheaper Chinese imports. It took me an entire evening until midnight to read all the reviews and watch YouTubers give their opinion until I found and settled on a beefy looking Xijia 3200 watt inverter with four sockets. Thank you to all the geek brothers out there reviewing equipment in such detail.

My next project will be replacing the battery pack. I am reluctant to go to lithium even though they are supposed to last longer. I worry about all the lithium being strip mined in Africa. We, at least, seem to have lots of lead which can be recovered. I do have a couple of portable lithium battery packs to tide me over and a couple of strings of Christmas lights I plug into the packs for on board lighting. As long as I have power for my computer and modem I can remain in residence, it doesn’t matter if the freezer isn’t running for a night. It just becomes a fridge temporarily. I can’t keep ice-cream in it, but otherwise can live with it. I am still able to get ice from it for my cooler. 

In the summer when I eat more salads I keep lettuce and other veggies in a vegibag that I keep wet. This is basically a Terry cloth bag that is meant to be used in the fridge, but it will keep food fine if hung inside the tiny house or kept hanging up in a net shopping bag.

I’ve become a lot more relaxed about storing food. As long as the temperature in the cooler is 50° or less its cool enough to keep food from going bad, despite the dire warning on my temperature gage. In the past people kept their food cool by floating containers such as mason jars full of food in a stream. They would also dig underground chambers called root cellars to store food longterm. I have has containers of yogurt grow a bit of mold in the summer and the cheese too, but otherwise no serious food harm was manifested.