Flood Plain Refrigerator

One the biggest uses of electrical energy in the home after the dryer is the refrigerator. That is why green blogs recommend that you clean the coils so that your refrigerator works more efficiently and saves electricity. Because I do not get my electricity from renewable energy sources, I have been thinking about going without a refrigerator.

When I go camping, I don't use a cooler. I find it is too much hassle with getting ice, and keeping things from getting soggy. Instead I use more processed food than I do at home. I would prefer to eat fresh vegetables, fruits, and milk without having to go to the store every other day or so. Any kind of meat spoils quickly unless it's preserved in salt or vinegar. And I would like to keep leftovers cool so I didn't have to eat them immediately. In the winter, I could keep all my refrigerated food outside or in the garage where it stays cool. But in the summer, that won't do.

Before there were refrigerators people used cool springs and ice houses or ice boxes. I've thought about building an old fashioned ice house, but that seems to be a lot of work both in the construction and maintenance. And I have no idea where I would get an annual supply of sawdust. I don't have a cool spring on my property, but since I live on a flood plain, I do have a sump pump. At certain times of year, my sump pump is running very frequently. And my basement is very cool.

I was thinking I could create an insulated box which had a heat pipe running through it and out of the bottom and into the sump. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe Without any additional electricity the heat pipe would conduct the heat out of the box and into the water. If I dug my sump a little deeper so that no matter what the level of the water in the ground was, when the water warmed up I could always pump the water out, then for little more than the cost of normally running my sump pump, I could keep my food cold to the temperature of the ground water. Even if I didn't have a sump, I could constructed a drain back system where water I pumped out of my sump, circulated through the ground and returned to my sump. The cost of maintaining circulating water would be a lot less than powering a compressor and could easily be powered by a PV panel.

Of course, that doesn't solve the problem of melting ice cream or keeping turkeys frozen. I guess it's back to the drawing board. Maybe I can find a fluid that would have a phase transition at such a low enough temperature that conceivably with the influence of gravity, it could draw off more heat energy bringing the temperature of the insulated box lower than the temperature of the sump water.