Tell me about your propane refrigerator

[Arktikos]

I love the idea of using a chest freezer as a fridge, and appreciate the link terracore provided for the temperature monitor.

The only apparent downside to this strategy is the that you wouldn't have any freezing capacity, right?

[terracore]

You would need a second unit for freezing, however the cost of buying and operating two units is much lower than buying one dual-purpose fridge like most people have. Having a larger freezer allows you to buy more stuff on sale (or harvest more pigs if you're into that) so your food costs go down along with your energy costs.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don't have one of these "chest refrigerators". We do know folks who do have them here in Hawaii and I also know people on the mainland who use them to refrigerate their homemade beer kegs. We've been thinking of buying another $200 HD chest freezer and one of those $30 gizmos to make it into a warm fridge for making aged cheeses with our goat milk but of course have 100 other projects ahead of that.

[Howleeboy]

One of our local goat cheese entrepreneurs ages his cheese in a small room cooled with a standard window mount a/c unit. He has a gizmo called a "cool bot" (I think) that overrides the factory tep control. It works very well.

[smarino]

This is helpful information on the potential energy savings you can get using a chest freezer instead of a regular refrigerator. The other drawback might be in a kitchen that is already built out, because fitting a chest freezer into a place designed for a fridge would require some modifications to the kitchen.

I have propane for just my stove here in Florida, and cook on it quite often. Judging by the propane that was used last year, this 75 gallon tank should last about 5 or 6 years before it needs filling again! A stove, even a 4 burner stove, uses very little propane, so compared to an electric stove that eats power, you could save a lot of money switching from electric to propane. Filling that 75 gallon tank costs about $300, so if it lasts 6 years that's only about $5 a month to run it. Our propane prices are probably less than in Hawaii though.

A passive solar water heater combined w/ an on demand propane water heater would probably be very economical to run too, but you would need a certain amount of sunlight consistently to get the benefits on the solar end of it.

[terracore]

We have an electric stove/oven in our kitchen, however we have one of these cheap propane stove/oven/burners in our lanai for baking things like chickens. We also use the burner for pressure canning. It sips the propane and as an added bonus, it doesn't heat our house up. We've had it for about 5 years and it still works great. When it dies we're getting another one. It's called "Camp Chef Camping Outdoor Oven with 2 Burner Camping Stove"

This is where we bought it (amazon):

http://amzn.to/2elAVhm

"A passive solar water heater combined w/ an on demand propane water heater would probably be very economical to run too, but you would need a certain amount of sunlight consistently to get the benefits on the solar end of it."

We love our solar hot water system. If we get a few hours of sunlight at least every couple of days we're good.