Short of buying a propane refrigerator- how do people keep their milk and other perishables cold? We have a spring about 1/2 mile away we could use, but that's kinda far to get a glass of milk.Any other ideas? Thank you.

-- kathy baker (kbaker@duo-county.com), August 15, 2000

Answers

Hi Kathy, Can't say about the stream, but I work for a company that buys dry ice for 50c a lb. 1/4 lb of dry ice will keep 12 lbs of butter frozen solid for 2 days. 10 lbs of dry ice, will keep a 40 sq. fridge cold for a week. Mother nature in the winter, dry ice in the summer?

-- Kathy (catfish@bestweb.net), August 15, 2000.

I have a propane frig now but before I got it in the summer months I used an ice chest and ice. The chest was inside an insulted box built from plywood and lined with foam insulation. (SOrt of like a chest inside a chest)The box was buried in the ground in a shady area. I used blocks of ice (instead of cubes or crushed) which seemed to keep longer.

-- Marci (ajourend@libby.org), August 15, 2000.

My Amish friends would put it in a basket and drop it in there well .

-- Patty (fodfarms@slic.com), August 15, 2000.

We lived without electricity for 2 and a half yrs. We had to buy stock in the ice companies, we used a ice chest. I also canned as much as I could. Winter time was great, stick it out on the front porch!

-- Bernice (geminigoats@yahoo.com), August 15, 2000.

To keep most perishable food safe to eat, you need to keep it below 40F and most springs don't get that cold. Yes, I know that people used spring houses for centuries to keep milk in, but they rarely kept it fresh for more than a day..

If you live in a dry area, evaporative cooling can be used to keep stuff cooler, but not cool enough not to spoil eventually. The simplest evaporative cooler is just some sort of frame with shelves that you can drape a wet cloth over. Most have the ends of the cloth in a container of water to keep it wet. I've always lived where it's too muggy to do this, so I've never really tried it.

If you live in an area with cold enough winters, you could try building an icehouse and fill it in the winter.

A root cellar can keep things cool too, but for most of the USA at least, the mid to upper 50's is the best you'll do. If you have much of a winter, you can drop the cellar temp quite a bit with a good design or combine it with the icehouse.

Propane fridges are pricy, but you might be able to find a camper-sized one used for cheap. Propane would be cheaper than buying ice. My propane fridge has trouble keeping up with the real hot weather, but part of the problem is a bad door seal I need to fix. On it's coldest setting it will get up to the mid-50's when it's in the upper 90's outside. Mine came with the camper I'm living in and is probably worth what I paid for the camper.

-- paul (p@ledgewood-consulting.com), August 15, 2000.

One of the "old time" ways was to make an ice house with double walls. Those walls were about a foot thick and were filled with sawdust. Kerosene was poured in the sawdust to kill termites. The inside of the house was covered with tarps to help keep the kerosene from stinkin up any food left inside. In the wintertime BIG chunks of creek ice or river ice was chopped out and delivered via horse and wagon to these little houses. Loaded inside the house, laid on sawdust and then covered with sawdust. Food was set on shelves above the ice. It wasn't real great but worked out ok-especially if it was the only refrigeration you had. Probably not practical today with all the other alternatives present. R.V. refrigerators are the simplest and cheapest to acquire and use. Make sure the gas burner is burning properly-nice blue flame with no yellow. Spiders just love building webs in'm. Just a small loss of flame or heat and these little chillers will suffer tremendously! Matt. 24:44

-- hoot (hoot@pcinetwork.com), August 15, 2000.

About 4 months or so ago Homepower had an article about a solar icemaker, it involved a parabolic trough reflector, a 20 foot section of 3 inch black (nongalvanized steel) pipe, 10lbs of calcium chloride salt (enviro friendly driveway de-icing salt-you can get it almost anywhere), 10lbs of pure ammonia (sp?), a condenser coil in a 55gal drum of water and a section of 10 inch pipe as the ammonia collector.
The way it worked was after charging the salt with the ammonia in the long pipe the parabolic reflector heated up the salt thus driving out the ammonia as a hot gas, it condesed in the coil and dripped down to the collector. After the heat was removed from the pipe the salt would start absorbing the ammonia again and make the ammonia in the collector start evaporating and absorbing heat from its surroundings. In the article he had the collector sitting in the bottom of an old defunct chest freezer, he said he could make something like 10 lbs of ice in about 3 hours.
I was thinking of tinkering with the basic design only instead of using a parabolic trough reflector I'm thinking of using a propane flame from a straighted out gas bbq grill flame pipe from an old rusted out gas grill that Ive got. Put the gas valve on a timer of some sort and you have a continuiously cycling fridge, the temp could be regulated by the timing of heat/cool cycles controlled by the timer, I have no idea how much propane it would use a month though.

If you cant find the article on thier website (www.homepower.com) I've got the original pdf file and I could email it to you or anybody else thats wants it.

man my spelling has gotten bad.....:-)

-- Dave (AK) (daveh@ecosse.net), August 16, 2000.

Kathy:

I asked my 'old timer' neighbors about this. They said basically they didn't try to keep food cold during summer. Usually excess milk was turned into something like buttermilk, cottage cheese or butter, which kept better than fresh milk, but wasn't kept long. Once it turned, it was fed to the stock. Spring, summer and fall meals were what came out of the garden, by foraging and whatever wild game might be available. There was no local block ice company. Winters were maybe a bit of fresh milk, if the cow hadn't dried up, canned or stored vegetables and fresh or smoked meats. This might turn your nose, but until about the late 40s they still went into town by a mule-drawn wagon. A fresh road kill wasn't passed by. When they did go into town, once a week, it was for things like salt, sugar, coffee, etc. they couldn't make or grow themselves. Sunday 'Going to Meeting' clothes might be bought, but the rest were homemade. Kids got one pair of school shoes a year. When they finally got their first refrigerator/freezer they really didn't know what to do with it. Freezer unit was too small for any practical purpose beyond ice cubes. Canned vegetables, when opened, didn't last long enough to justify refrigeration. How times have changed!

-- Ken S. in TN (scharabo@aol.com), August 17, 2000.