greenspree.ca at The Sietch

So after living in the strawbale home for a year and a half I realized that I never posted the results of one of themost talked about and controversial aspects of our plans, the chest fridge!

From chest fridge

Here is the fridge, it’s a 10.5 cubic foot (actual dimensions, it’s labelled a12 cubic foot) and has a Brewers Edge temperature controller attached:

From chest fridge

I’ve attached a Kill-a-Watt meter to it for the last 8-9 days and measured the consumption:

From chest fridge

From chest fridge

2.36KWH in 205 hours works out to be about 100KWH per year.  Compare that to my previous research that suggests a comparable upright refrigerator of the same size would use about 350KWH and you can see it has made a difference in our energy bills.

From chest fridge

Inside you can see that it is about as full as a comparable sized upright fridge and we find the usability to be about the same as a regular fridge.  We do put in a damp rid type product (Calcium Chloride) and have to clean the fridge about as often as a regular one.  Here is the damp rid tray:

From chest fridge

Alsmost time for a refill!  You can see some rust from the first couple weeks we were using it and didn’t use the damp rid in it, since then we haven’t had any problems!  We also have a 15 cubic foot freezer in the utility room/pantry for freezing things.

In our Energy market 250KWH a year is about $35, not exactly a lot of money, but every decision we made like having switched outlets to reduce ghost loads, drainwater heat recovery system to reduce the amount of electricity the hot water heater uses and CFL and high efficiency halogen lighting all add up to a good amount of savings per year.