floorplan of a small cabin: mud room

Creating a simple shelter - and living with it!

Floorplan
Kitchen
Master Bedroom
Loft
Gear room
Bathroom
Mud room
Livingroom I
Livingroom II
Deck
Entrance

Floorplan of a small cabin:

Refrigerator


Cabin Intro Cabin Images Building the Cabin Brief Building Story Heating Floorplan FAQ Construction Diary Pre-Building Notes

I knew that choosing and installing this relatively important appliance would require some thought. An electric refrigerator easily represents the single largest power consumer in an off-the-grid home. Something to ponder with a 300 watt array! There's off course the propane option, but since cost and ethics speak strongly against this solution, it was rejected early on. Also a monster free standing unit would gobble up a lot of precious floorspace. Again Backwoods Solar came to the rescue. They suggested the Novacool R4500, a 12V, built-in reefer of modest dimension and power consumption. The unit is high quality, plenty big for us (others beware!!) and equipped with a silent Danfoss compressor. From mid april to mid october our system can easily fuel Nova's average needs of 300 watt hours/day. So far so good. But what to do in the remaining months? Framing the refrigerator into a northfacing exterior wall with half the unit protruding into the frigid winter air was the elegant solution. Simply turn off the power when the days get short and cloudy and wait for nature to passively preserve the crisp veggies. It works remarkably well. The portion that sticks out in the elements is framed in by a bottomless plywood box with a sloping metal roof. In the summer, when the temps hover around 90 degrees we wrap the refrigerator with precut pieces of rigid insulation. I expected some condensation to form on the outside of the refrigerators metal casing, given the steep temperature gradient from inside the cabin to outside. With this in mind the wall opening is tightly packed with rigid insulation to eliminate airflow before applying a sturdy vapor barrier. The bottom of the hole is gently sloping to the outside. Inspections at various seasons have not revealed any moisture, though.