The Ultimate Refrigerator

A

antoniohawk

Limp Gawd
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Nov 3, 2003
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I wake up at 6 every morning, shower, and have some breakfast at 6:30 and head for school. An hour later and I'm thirsty for something a little more refreshing than water, and cheaper than what comes out of the vending machines. So I thought to myself, wouldn't it be sweet to have a fridge in my locker! Then, whenever I got the urge to have quench my thirst, there would be the resources to do so. So here's my question, is this possible? Can I hook it up to a car battery or such and does anyone know where I can get a small fridge?
 
heh, i live in kansas city, ks (well, overland park).

it'd drain your battery to much
 
You'd have to get a massive deep-cycle battery. Walmart was selling some 6-pack sized fridges, don't know if they still do. It'd be pretty plug and play, but you'd have to charge the battery pretty often. School might not be happy about having a bunch of dangerous material in your locker, either. What you could do it get a large block of styrofoam, hollow out a hole that will fit your can/bottle pretty well, then just bring in a really cold drink every morning. The styrofoam will keep it nice and cold. Surrounded by 110VAC outlets... too bad you can't just run an extension cord to your locker.


Edit- if my calcuations are right(I'm not so confident), then this fridge would last 30 hours on a standard 120AH deep cycle RV battery.
 
Originally posted by phasmatis_nox
You'd have to get a massive deep-cycle battery. Walmart was selling some 6-pack sized fridges, don't know if they still do. It'd be pretty plug and play, but you'd have to charge the battery pretty often. School might not be happy about having a bunch of dangerous material in your locker, either. What you could do it get a large block of styrofoam, hollow out a hole that will fit your can/bottle pretty well, then just bring in a really cold drink every morning. The styrofoam will keep it nice and cold. Surrounded by 110VAC outlets... too bad you can't just run an extension cord to your locker.


Edit- if my calcuations are right(I'm not so confident), then this fridge would last 30 hours on a standard 120AH deep cycle RV battery.
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problem is, it takes awhile for the fridge to cool down, and while it's doing so it's running at max... which sucks down the juice like no other. once a minifridge has cooled down, it's fine until you unplug it... if he's gonna only be running for 30 hours (doubt it'd even last that long), it's gonna be taking up alot of juice.
 
Alright, that's what i was suspecting would be the answer. Any ideas of something that might not suck major juice? I wanna mod out my locker somehow.
 
throw some dry ice in there every morning perhaps? that'll keep it cold. dry ice in something insulated (like 1-2inch stryofoam cooler...you can get those at gallions, walmart, target, or that new place out by the i-70 and kc speedway (forget the name... :eek: ), will last 2-3 days easy.
 
a peltier would be a good solution. though they do take a lot of power.
 
It would be challenging to cool a peltier in the small space available. They produce a ton of heat. The hot side has whatever heat is pulled from the cold side, plus an even great amount that's just overhead. Without sucking in a lot of outside air it will heat the locker up pretty quickly i think. A good peltier for this kind of situation would probably be 12v 5A or more, that will drain a battery pretty quick.

I think using an ice chest of some sort would be a good way. You could buy two ice packs and bring one home when you leave and refreeze it for the next day.

The best way would be to get permission to use a teacher's fridge. Many teachers at my school have minifridges in their classroom, one teacher I know has a full size fridge :)
 
When I go camping I use an ice chest and a couple of 500mL soft drink bottles that I fill with water and freeze the night before. They stay frozen untill about 5pm even in hot summer sun.

Heating and cooling are the two biggest users of energy, which makes it very hard to do either on batterys.
 
@ everyone
Thanks for the advice fellas, I'll prob end up just using an ice chest if I do anything.

@ plot
I think your talking about Cabellas :D
 
I've done this... made a coke can chiller that ran off a 12 volt battery and used a spare peltier, turned on with a PIC and a couple of MOSFETs. This was halfway through EE, when everyone was pissed off that cans of Coke out of the vending machines went up to $1.25/can, when you could buy 2 dozen cans at Costco for $6.

The device worked perfectly on the bench, but once you put it in the locker it produced warm cola - it'd just heat up the inside of the locker, to the point where the coke ended up being hotter than if you just left it in the locker. I thought about heatsinking to the locker itself, but that would be too hard to do. And I couldn't exactly cut fan holes in the locker for ventilation...

Oh well... put green cold cathodes in your locker :D
 
well for heatsinking, you could just have it hook up by some powerful magnet, to let the heat radiate through the locker metal.
 
Originally posted by gee
I've done this... made a coke can chiller that ran off a 12 volt battery and used a spare peltier, turned on with a PIC and a couple of MOSFETs. This was halfway through EE, when everyone was pissed off that cans of Coke out of the vending machines went up to $1.25/can, when you could buy 2 dozen cans at Costco for $6.

The device worked perfectly on the bench, but once you put it in the locker it produced warm cola - it'd just heat up the inside of the locker, to the point where the coke ended up being hotter than if you just left it in the locker. I thought about heatsinking to the locker itself, but that would be too hard to do. And I couldn't exactly cut fan holes in the locker for ventilation...

Oh well... put green cold cathodes in your locker :D
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If the locker you're talking about is anthing like the ones I had in my high school...

There were vents at the bottom, and vents at the top.

Get a duct and seal all around the bottom vent. Put a fan inline with your duct blowing inward. Duct that to a heatsink, being careful to recover the exhaust air with another duct. Put another fan inline with that. Duct that to the top exhaust and seal well.

Now you have a closed exhaust system. Insulate your cold side well, and you have a nice cold drink when you want it.
 
hrm... 1.25$ for pop? i'm glad i'm one of those rare special people that likes his pepsi warm :)
 
Funny, I'd occasionally thought about doing something like this with a battery and one of those 12V coffemakers. If it wern't for all the damn terrists running around these days, it would've been hilarious to see steam wafting out of the top of somebody's locker in the morning, accompanied by a quiet perking... :D
 
Originally posted by Aristarchus
Funny, I'd occasionally thought about doing something like this with a battery and one of those 12V coffemakers. If it wern't for all the damn terrists running around these days, it would've been hilarious to see steam wafting out of the top of somebody's locker in the morning, accompanied by a quiet perking... :D
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in high school we never had a problem finding a teacher or two that wouldn't let us keep a coffee machine in there room as long as they got to drink teh coffee too.
 
As far as the refrigirator goes:

get a peltier and 12V battery and just turn it on for a while until it cools down
 
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