Step 6: Is there a future for the California Cooler?
A couple of mornings ago as I road my bike to work, I decide to see if I could spot any California Cooler vents on houses. Not surprisingly, I found a bunch. They are very common in the flats of Berkeley, not just on single family houses, but on old apartment buildings. It seems like the majority of them are for floor-to-ceiling pantries. Yesterday, I surprised myself even more by counting that more than half the houses on my block have them, as well as one apartment building (I will definitely be asking my neighbors if I can take a peak inside their kitchens to see what has become of their California Coolers!).
I can imagine that people in the 1930s were excited to get their new-fangled refrigerators and that continuing to use the primitive California Cooler would have seemed ridiculous. But we live in a different era now, one in which using renewable energy is preferable. The cool air that we have along the California coast comes to us free of charge via winds and currents of the Pacific Ocean.
I have a fantasy that others will resurrect their California Coolers as we have done. But, from a green perspective, does it really make sense to do this? I think that our method of storing some foods in the California Cooler, and others in the refrigerator will definitely use less energy that we did before. According to a Federal Trade Commission Document our old refrigerator used 464 kilowatt hours and our new one 309 kWh per year, for an annual savings of 155 kWh. That's about enough energy to run our entire household for 17 days. Not bad for a cabinet with two vents in it!
But, when I think about how much it cost to make the cooler, it's actually kind of embarrassing. I think it cost at least as much as a brand new refrigerator! Of course, most of the expense was in labor, and we also chose to use pretty expensive materials because we wanted it to look really nice.One choice that could have been made differently was the use of polyurethane insulation. This is a non-recyclable petroleum product. If I were to do it again, I might choose some other type of insulation, such as recycled denim. However, I'm not sure that other types of insulation would do such a good job, or work for a long time with moisture present.
If you live in an old house that has a boarded up California Cooler, would you consider doing something like this? I'd love to hear comments from you. If you are a builder, would you consider putting a California Cooler in a new house?
Also, out of curiosity, I'd be interested to hear from people in other cities where houses were built between 1900 and 1930. How common are California Coolers there?
I actually think that resurrecting the California Cooler is a subset of a larger energy saving idea - to use outdoor air to aid refrigeration. Under certain conditions, it could be more efficient for a regular electric refrigerator to exchange air with the outdoors instead of the air in your kitchen. And, in certain places, during certain months, it's cold enough to use outdoor air as a freezer. Imagine if in places like Minnesota if people had the choice to operate their freezer with outside air in the winter and then use it normally in the summer. That could save a lot of energy when compared to running a freezer in the winter while heating the air inside the house for comfort. I have started doing little things to make our fridge not work as hard. For example, when I cook a big pot of soup, I let it cool down to room temperature until putting it in the fridge. Sometimes I'll leave something out overnight (if it doesn't have a smell that would attract animals) and then put it in the fridge in the morning, shaving off the amount of cooling the fridge needs to do on that item.
I can imagine that people in the 1930s were excited to get their new-fangled refrigerators and that continuing to use the primitive California Cooler would have seemed ridiculous. But we live in a different era now, one in which using renewable energy is preferable. The cool air that we have along the California coast comes to us free of charge via winds and currents of the Pacific Ocean.
I have a fantasy that others will resurrect their California Coolers as we have done. But, from a green perspective, does it really make sense to do this? I think that our method of storing some foods in the California Cooler, and others in the refrigerator will definitely use less energy that we did before. According to a Federal Trade Commission Document our old refrigerator used 464 kilowatt hours and our new one 309 kWh per year, for an annual savings of 155 kWh. That's about enough energy to run our entire household for 17 days. Not bad for a cabinet with two vents in it!
But, when I think about how much it cost to make the cooler, it's actually kind of embarrassing. I think it cost at least as much as a brand new refrigerator! Of course, most of the expense was in labor, and we also chose to use pretty expensive materials because we wanted it to look really nice.One choice that could have been made differently was the use of polyurethane insulation. This is a non-recyclable petroleum product. If I were to do it again, I might choose some other type of insulation, such as recycled denim. However, I'm not sure that other types of insulation would do such a good job, or work for a long time with moisture present.
If you live in an old house that has a boarded up California Cooler, would you consider doing something like this? I'd love to hear comments from you. If you are a builder, would you consider putting a California Cooler in a new house?
Also, out of curiosity, I'd be interested to hear from people in other cities where houses were built between 1900 and 1930. How common are California Coolers there?
I actually think that resurrecting the California Cooler is a subset of a larger energy saving idea - to use outdoor air to aid refrigeration. Under certain conditions, it could be more efficient for a regular electric refrigerator to exchange air with the outdoors instead of the air in your kitchen. And, in certain places, during certain months, it's cold enough to use outdoor air as a freezer. Imagine if in places like Minnesota if people had the choice to operate their freezer with outside air in the winter and then use it normally in the summer. That could save a lot of energy when compared to running a freezer in the winter while heating the air inside the house for comfort. I have started doing little things to make our fridge not work as hard. For example, when I cook a big pot of soup, I let it cool down to room temperature until putting it in the fridge. Sometimes I'll leave something out overnight (if it doesn't have a smell that would attract animals) and then put it in the fridge in the morning, shaving off the amount of cooling the fridge needs to do on that item.
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Back here in the US, In the winter, we often us our garage as a "refrigerator" and our back deck as a "freezer". And as for eggs, those who grew up on farms know that the gathered eggs always sat on the counter in a basket. No one even considered putting them in the icebox. Thanks for the instructable.
My parents' old farm up in Mendocino had a functional cooler pantry, that had never been closed up. It was wood, not tin lined, except at the top, where there was a pan that could be removed, for holding a block of ice. My parents actually would put a big roasting pan with a bag of ice in it up there when the power went out, in order to keep perishables cold, and in winter kept milk and dairy in it without needing ice. It was installed in the mudporch, not the kitchen, though, so it never got warm the way the house did. It was also on the side of the house that got the least sun, and the bungalow-style house had large overhanging eaves that protected it during summer.
The point of this is that California is not some monolithic sunny climate, and that the cooler pantry was actually as often an ice box (back when that meant a guy would bring you ice every couple of days).
The device described here does not appear to work by evaporative cooling, but rather by a controlled exposure to cooler external air.
My first thought was that this might be made far more reliable (and efficient) by connecting the louver system and temp sensors to an arduino-controlled actuator. Close the louvers whenever the outside temperature is greater than that inside the cold box, or when outside temperatures dip below 0 degrees celsius.
If the outside temp is lower than the cabinet temp, but above 33 def F, then open the vents and turn on the LED, otherwise close them and turn it off. I'd put in a small hysteresis so that when the outside and inside temps are about the same, the vents don't open and close constantly.
If the cabinet temp gets above 60/65 (whatever) flash the status LED on the door, to warn that it has gotten too warm.
If you wanted to deal with high temperature semi-automatically, you *could* even have the controller turn on a small peltier heat pump to dump heat into the kitchen, though you'd have to hide the external (hot) heat-sink somewhere inconspicuous. that would still get good airflow (perhaps disguise it as trim near the top.)
The criterion for opening the vents is that the outside temp is lower than the cabinet temp, and the cabinet temp is above some lower cutoff, like 40F.
Also, when I was in engineering school some students did a design project where they altered a refrigerator so it could take in air from the outside. They had a set of valves, so if it got cold outside, a fan would blow in outside air, and if it was not cold outside, the freezer would operate normally. Like the CA Cooler, you would have to have some holes/vents in the kitchen wall to exchange air with the outside.
As a child in New England in the 60's, I remember my great-grandmother keeping her eggs, butter, fruit and vegetables in the basement. I thought it was strange that she walked up and down the stairs instead of just putting those things in the fridge, but it was a habit of a different era. If we want to maintain a sustainable way of life as a society, it would be wise to revisit a lot of these "old time" ways of life.
- harvesting waste heat from (or dumping excess household heat into) sewage before it leaves house,
- outdoor cold trap panels for catching heat that leaves house through walls and roofs in winter,
- indoor cold trap panels for catching heat entering house through walls and roofs in summer,
- heat accumulating devices (insulated mass with great heat capacity and embedded heat exchanger) to take advantage of temperature and electric energy price differences over 24 h cycle,
- electronics' cooling modules (plug your PC to wall "cold" outlet and enjoy silence)
- solar modules to get additional heat if needed
- deep soil heat exchanger for dumping out excess heat or pumping in needed heat,
- cheaper thermal appliances for the same functions we have today (fridges, freezers, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, AC indoor units, cookers, ovens, irons, hairdryers, ...), that use less electricity and connect to thermal outlets,
etc.
I believe that, if we had such installations in our homes, there would be whole industry (opening positions, economic growth, yadda, yadda ...) of thermal appliances to buy and also plenty of DIY instructables on building different interesting gadgets for it.
Please share this idea around and raise awareness, so we could get our hands on them in our lifetime!
I deliberately tried to avoid impressing my view of what medium should be used to transfer heat in thermal installations, but so far water (or some water-based solution capable of staying in liquid form in wide temperature range) seems like a good candidate. I guess that crucial part of technology would be the point of connection of appliance to installation, or answering the question: how to avoid accidental leakage of dangerously hot or cold fluids at plug-in or plug-out time? Perhaps connection points should be designed with embedded intelligence and multiple valves and locks, enabling drying out of connection points and appliances' "plumbing" before breaking connections.
Some people still have root cellars around here. I did see an old Mother Earth News where they had an ice chest in the basement, and ran loops of copper piper around the inside of it, and put it in-line with their incoming waterline. It was a modern "spring house"!
Now that would be just pure AWSOME!!