Fridge Root Cellar Safety
I got a kick
out of your refrigerator
burying idea, but wonder about thecooling fluids, if there are any, and if there might be any chemicals you'd not want, seeping into any vegetables you might be storing?
That's a great question! A century ago, the chemicals used to
keep refrigerators cold included ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur
dioxide, which leaked out of fridges and killed people. As a
result, we switched over to freon, a chemical that isn't toxic to
humans but does rip big holes in the ozone layer if it escapes
from your fridge. In the 1990s, we switched again and started
using a chemical that neither harms us nor the ozone layer.
Our fridge may date from the freon era, but since the fridge stopped
cooling our food even though it kept running, we can be pretty sure
that the refrigerants leaked out already. The
book we got the fridge root cellar idea out of suggested removing
the cooling coils, but we think that we'd be more likely to puncture
them and release refrigerants in the process. Hopefully, any
remaining refrigerant gases will be safely sequestered in the soil.
| This post is part of our Fridge Root Cellar series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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