Refrigerator root cellar freeze protection
The refrigerator
root cellar has been
doing a good job lately keeping the carrots from freezing during nights
in the low 20's, but just barely. The thermometer we put inside was
showing the low temperature to be 34, which was telling us if it got
much colder the carrots might be exposed to freezing conditions.
I installed a
thermostatically controlled outlet today known as a Thermo Cube with a light bulb plugged in.
When the inside temperature
reaches 35 the light will come on and shut off when it warms up to 45.
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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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It will be interesting to see if that works. Because for the water to starts freezing, its surroundings have to bee cooler than the water; there has to be a temperature difference before there can be heat flow.
A related idea;
If you warm some jugs of water up slightly next to the woodstove, and put them in the root cellar in the evening, it might give off enough heat to keep the frost away during the night. Of course you'd have to balance the heat flow from the jug to the cellar and from the cellar to the outside.
doc --- I disagree --- I think it's doing quite well. The earth enclosing the fridge has kept the humidity extremely high, which is what you need for root crops, and it hasn't frozen inside despite 10 days with lows around 22. As a frame of reference, the surrounding ground has frozen hard, and down in the floodplain where it doesn't get much sun, it's stayed frozen most of the day. Definitely much colder than our average November!
Other root cellar I've used (real ones) have required a light bulb when the outside temperature gets into the teens. (Most root cellars aren't dug five feet down because that's quite an engineering feat.)