Essex project builds backyard passive freezer | The Burlington Free Press | Burlington, Vermont

Tailer and his team of 10 interns are building a passive freezer that will keep food frozen year round using no purchased energy. It’s constructed out of mostly local, recycled or reused products

via Essex project builds backyard passive freezer | The Burlington Free Press | Burlington, Vermont.

This is pretty cool. The idea seems like a good one. Make a bunch of ice in the winter and keep it well insulated during the summer. I think that idea is similar to what the Ice Kings did in the Turn of the Century. They even had special ships for shipping ice to the Bahamas and Caribbean.

They would cut huge blocks of ice out of the northern lakes and store them in caves and barns with lots of straw which is a pretty good insulator. Big blocks also melted slower then small blocks. Most cities had large, heavily insulated ice buildings that housed the ice until it was sold.

They still had to be cut to consumer sizes for ice boxes, but they would do that locally after shipping the big blocks by refrigerated train. Of course, the Ice Kings were dethroned when refrigeration became a consumer level product after WWII.

I remember when I was a kid that there was an old ice storage warehouse that was being torn down, but they were having a hard time of it. It had such thick concrete walls the wrecking ball would just bounce off. Then they tried explosives which blew out the walls but the support structure remained. They ended up just bashing it a lot with a stronger wrecking ball.

Sadly, it probably wouldn’t work well in CO. While the mountains do get very cold it is not unusual for above freezing weather to prevail for long periods of time in the winter even at night.

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