yeah, I love retrofitting stuff. not. We've continued to have trouble with the fridge cooling system, as it seems to heat up too much in the back, without enough good air flow. One problem is that the intake sucks in the really hot outside air, so I thought why not try and cool that air by running it through the ground?
So I dug a trench through the west patio...
Which really wasn't that hard, as most of that is fill that I put there only 6 years ago anyway:
But the hard part - and the non-fill part, was up under the little deck, along with the water lines and the electric lines:
and then I popped open the intake hole, removing the screen that I had plastered in there:
Of course now that new water line was right in the way, so I had to go around it with my pipes:
But after plastering it back into position, it seems like it looks ok:
2 comments:
Hey, I have been thinking thru a similar scenario regarding fridge and cooling performance here in south Texas.
My planned approach would be similar to yours, but instead of pulling cold air, I would dig a trench around several Mesquite trees I have and run a loop of air conditioner copper tubing. I would then attach that inline with the existing refrigerant compressor loop in the system, do a vacuum, test for leaks and refill with refrigerant. The loop should be enough to dissipate most of the heat from the refrigerant. With this setup, I should be able to get rid of the cooling fan altogether and keep the heat dissipation outside where it belongs.
This would be like the commercial units where they have the heat exchanger on the roof and the evaporator inside the climate controlled area (or is it the other way around?).
wow. well, that sounds like it would work... if you have the capability to do the compressor work, that makes a bunch of sense. Make sure the trench is deep enough, both for cooling, and for potential frost danger.
you may want to try it somehow before building it into your house (the exchange going through a wall) that's where I screwed up.
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