by nancy » Mon Jan 16, 2012 12:09 pm
I know that many people have had problems in floods and other electric outages with keeping food frozen and cold. We live in an area where the power can go out for a week or two in the winter. This got me thinking about my freezer. I tried to run it with an inverter but the compresser took too much start and just wouldn’t work. So I started looking around to see what I could find and I went to Walmart. They have small but not too small freezers. The one I got is about waist high and about four foot long. They don’t take much power but hold quite a bit. The main thing is to check and see how much power it takes and make sure your inverter is bigger to compensate for the compresser. I have a harbor freight inverter at 1000 watts peak power. And I can start my little freezer from unfrozen on a summer day and run it to freezing on a very small car battery. I haven’t tried keeping it on to see how long it stays frozen on the same battery but since it doesn’t run all the time probably quite a while.
The little freezer was 149.00 when I got it and the inverter was 69.00 and I just used the batteries we had. So this is a pretty cheap way to keep frozen food with no electric. You can also freeze containers of ice and build an insulated box to put them in and have refrigeration as well.
1 comment
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February 8, 2012 at 6:32 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
The problem with the cheap inverters is that the ground at the outlets is not a ground, it’s actually half of the 110 Volts, 55 Volts to the negative battery ground.
This can cause problems and unexpected shocks.
The problem can be solved by using an old style ground adapter but not using it’s grounding strap or wire, to eliminate the false inverter ground.
The next problem I can see is that it doesn’t take very long for the battery to go flat.
Thinking about hooking an inverter to a car battery with the engine running may overheat the alternator when heavy loads are drawn.
A small generator of about 2 KW might make more sense, since the power from cheap inverters isn’t a true sine wave and isn’t very healthy for appliances on the long run.
I have some inverters myself, but would only use them for short duration instant power and limited purposes.