8 ms·
Some serious over engineering going on here. The fridge should be set to the coldest possible temperature without the food freezing, as close to 1 °C as possibl
by slacka 8y ago
Some serious over engineering going on here. The fridge should be set to the coldest possible temperature without the food freezing, as close to 1 °C as possible an run whenever there is solar power available. The only software need I see would be a warning if the internal temperature got too warm.
Instead of smarter software, the focus should be on insulation and adding mass to hold the heat. For example, I put a foam insulating board over my 22 cu. Chest Freezer to improve it's efficiency.
- jncraton 8y agoYou aren't wrong, but there is some value in a more complex control system. For example, the fridge uses some sort of hysteresis to prevent the compressor from cycling on and off too quickly. Let's say it runs for 15 minutes every hour. You ideally want it to schedule that last 15 minute run at the latest time possible when enough sunlight is still available to run it. This shortens the amount of time that the fridge needs to be able to stay cold without power.
- joeyh 8y agoI've thought about trying to add that eventually, but I think I would need a weather forcast with insolation data and also some modeling of when the sun goes behind trees/hills at different times of the year. Anyone know a good insolation forecast API?
- floatrock 8y agoNever used it, but I've heard good things about the darksky API: https://darksky.net/dev https://darksky.net/dev
- pvg 8y agoAn even further radical simplification would be just plugging the fridge into an outlet. But that seems like it would be missing the point a bit.
- rwmj 8y agoHe lives off-grid.
- pvg 8y agoAnd?
- LukeShu 8y agoHe doesn't have an outlet to plug it in to. He gets all of his electricity from the solar panels. His whole house runs on 12 volt DC.
- pvg 8y agoRight, which is 'overengineering' compared to getting a generator and an inverter.
- quickthrower2 8y agoOr moving to a city?
- welly 8y agoWho wants to run a generator all day? Solar panels, bank of batteries, generator to top up the batteries in the winter when you're not generating electricity from the panels. I live off grid and this is my set up. During the summer I don't need to run the generator at all and I only have 350w of solar panels. This is mainly because I run almost entirely 12v appliances.
- djur 8y agoLiving off-grid is overengineering compared to the alternative. It's not surprising people would jump through seemingly unnecessary hoops once they've made that decision.
- 8y ago
- niftich 8y agoThe classic, low-tech (and sustainable!) way of adding thermal mass is to embed it in the ground and leverage the thermal mass of the earth around you; seemingly pointed out by comments [1][2] that haven't gotten as much traction as ones discussing high-tech. Then you don't have to cool nearly as much. Talk about over-engineering. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17107254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17107254 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17107439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17107439
- icebraining 8y agoThat's a pretty good option if you already have a basement, but if not, seems way more over-engineered to me. Excavating, building walls, dealing with water leaks...
- joeyh 8y agoA complication that my blog post doesn't touch on is that the fridge is sharing the same solar panels that power the rest of my house. I want a good battery charge and a cold fridge, and I want the right tradeoffs to be made in non-ideal situations.