Refridgerator Heat Reuse
It’s winter in Michigan and I’ve been keeping the heater between 60 and 65 degrees. My kombucha culture, on the other hand, prefers a temperature between 70 and 80 degrees, so the culure was growing VERY slowly. I’ve been very interested in energy reuse lately, so I started looking for something I could use to build an incubator without utilizing extra energy. The solution I found is the refridgerator. When the coolant is re-compressed it gives off a lot of heat, this is how it transfers the heat from inside the fridge to the outside. I used some cardboard and some reflective insulation:
To build a box on top of the fridge. Basically the heat moves up the back into the box where it is trapped. Colder air falls out of the incubator where the box goes beyond the edge of the fridge. This sets up a convection current and keeps most of the heat within the insulated box. Also the box had to be insulated against the fridge itself, which is cold on the outside.
(the coils on the back of the fridge are under the shiny insulation) This is actually very effective for rasing the tempeture, I’ve measured at times 10 degrees above the ambient room temperature. The kombucha culture now grows much faster.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:39 am
The energy “re-use” might be done at the expense of you fridge efficiency.
January 4th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
i did consider that, however the insulation only affects about 1/4 of the exchanger on the back of the fridge, and also leaves plenty of room for air to circulate. think of a fridge backed up against a wall also, which definately has more of an effect than this (also probably the reason why the fridge has such a large exchanger. i’ll post some more pics that address this concern..