Propane Refrigerator Small

Just This Side of Solar Panels, a Lesson In Conservation

A few years ago I decided my family ought to use fewer fossil fuels but we didn’t know what to do. We were, and largely remain, average East Coast dwellers burning up fossil fuel in our cars and house and applauding, from afar, off-grid handymen and people rich enough to buy two banks of solar panels.

We live in a 1,100-square-foot Victorian house in a tiny Connecticut town. My family considers itself frugal and environmentally conscious. We keep the thermostat low, use compact fluorescents (and don’t throw them in the regular trash), aren’t big appliance users, don’t have an air conditioner. We have one home computer and no microwave. We cook on a propane stove and use a water-saving shower nozzle.

When utility deregulation and supply shortages hit the Northeast a few years ago, I started to pay attention to our electric bills. The bill for the period from mid-January to mid-February 2005, came to $216.37 for 1,694 kilowatt-hours of power. (Including all of the transmission and distribution surcharges in Connecticut, the rate at that time was almost 13 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now it’s more like 19.)

In southern New England, nuclear and natural gas, augmented by oil and coal (there’s a coal plant in New London) still provide much of the electricity. My family’s high electric bill forced me to look at our way of life, consider our electricity and where it comes from. I quickly learned that we were paying not only much more than we had budgeted, but that we were using almost twice as much electricity as the average household in our state, even though we have a small house and don’t heat with electricity. (We heat with an oil-burning furnace.) It puzzled us, but it appeared that our electric hot water heater was the main culprit.

The same month, I talked to Ed Witkin, who at the time lived west of me in Bridgewater, Conn., with his wife, Ellen Shrader, and their two daughters. Their modern house ran almost entirely on solar energy. They were not connected to the electric grid; no wires extended up their long driveway from the street. Forced by their own choice to be careful with power, they had settled into a routine of using no more than 150 kilowatt-hours a month.

The Witkin-Shrader family was the same size as ours—two adults and two teenage daughters—and the house itself was larger than ours. They were using one-tenth of what we were in the winter (which is our highest use time because we don’t have air-conditioning). They weren’t sitting in the dark, washing in frigid water, or cooking on an open fire. Like my family they owned one computer and did without a microwave. Their daughters took long, hot showers just as ours did, they had a propane kitchen stove similar to ours, and they, too, watched little television.

Gas & Propane Refrigerators For Outdoor Use: How Do They Work ...

Gas refrigerator or propane refrigerator – whatever you call it – is a type of compact refrigerator that does not work on electric power source.  Instead, it works on propane gas.  But exactly how does this work?

Considered to be huge a money saver, a typical gas / propane refrigerator is completely independent from electric source power.  This refrigerator design works on natural propane gas; other units are more flexible to be compatible with solar power (via solar panel).  Ironic though this may seem to you but propane refrigerators uses the burning propane to cool the refrigerator on the inside.

Without being too technical about it, this is how it works.  A gas refrigerator uses ammonia as the main coolant for the appliance unit.  To create a continuous cycle of this coolant, water, hydrogen and ammonia are needed.  They undergo several chemical reactions until the process leads to produce a freezing vapor, which is then used to cool the interiors of the refrigerator.  The technicalities behind this concept may be difficult to understand on the outset, but this is how it works: burning gas propane undergoes several chemical reactions to finally cool the refrigerator and that is basically all that there is to it.

Buyers oftentimes overlook that in various outdoor applications, gas propane fridges are much more reliable than any other type of mini fridges .  For off-grid places where electricity is relatively absent, you can still guarantee that the food you stored on the fresh are still fresh and safe to eat.  Propane-powered refrigerators, unlike conventional mini refrigerators, do not have compressors integrated into their unit.  And so there will be lesser chances of cooling performance problems and you do not have to deal with the troubling noise inside your fridge.

For such an affordable price, you can get a valuable deal for a gas or propane fridge if you buy them from reliable manufacturers.  Dometic and Norcold are two of the best sources for RV fridges that are essentially propane-powered.  You can jumpstart your search by exploring their product showrooms.

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