A new fridge

Our Engel refrigerator arrived yesterday afternoon. It is larger than I had pictured it in my head. The interior is plenty large enough for the whole family.

The refrigerator pulls about 30-40 Watts when it's cooling (about 2-3 minutes every 20 minutes or so) and it pulls 4-5 Watts when not cooling. I have it hooked up to my wattage counter so I can see how much electricity it uses in 24 hours. I will know that at 3:00 this afternoon. So far it looks like we'll be able to run it off just a portion of one panel's output. We bought 2 panels to take into account overcast days and extremely hot days. The extra electricity on sunny days will not go to waste.

Today sometime the solar panels that power the refrigerator will be arriving.

All together we spent about $1,425.00 on the refrigerator and panels.

You may be asking yourself why we would spend so much on what amounts to a refrigerator the size of a medium sized cooler... Well, the answer is that we need refrigeration on the road and wherever we might end up and we don't want to have to pay for electricity or propane. An RV refrigerator runs between $700 - $1,200 dollars and runs off propane (quite a bit actually) or DC power at 6-10 times the power consumption. The Engel and solar panels basically give us free refrigeration from now on - no need for an RV park's hookups to keep foods cold (or even frozen).

So why solar when grid electricity is so cheap right now? The answer is not so much about the cost of electricity - although prices for electricity will always go up in the future (here's an example of how volatile it can get in a hurry). We're freeing ourselves from the whole electrical grid. You can't imagine how nice it is to be able to look at property that is "unimproved" in the same way that most people look at a city lot. Being able to provide all of your own power you need without having to buy fuel for a generator, fill propane tanks or pay an RV park for electricity. Being able to buy property that most people would not consider because of the cost of running utilities to the site will save us many times over the cost of the initial investment. Consider the price difference between a .16 acre plot on the edge of town with utilities against the cost of a full acre of unimproved land just a few miles away...

Our feeling is that everything is just going to keep getting more and more expensive over time. Energy costs just keep going up and up. It's better to buy in now while the costs are still relatively cheap. Once fuel prices hit a certain level, the price of everything else (especially alternative energy sources) will go through the roof. Just in the past year our solar panels went from $265 each to $323.00 each. That's $58.00 per panel in just under one year. There's a big demand for solar, wind and water power alternatives. Waiting yet another year will only cost us more.