Just last week, we introduced you to the LED solar pebble — a dependable and easily transportable solar-powered light that can be used in rural areas that lack a steady source of electricity. Today, it’s the solar refrigerator — an equally fascinating and useful development that is also made for those same remote areas.
The solar powered refrigerator was developed by the sustainable engineering firm True Energy and runs on what the company calls Sure Chill Technology. True Energy says that Sure Chill can guarantee a constant and reliable cooling temperature in “the toughest environments. Here’s how it works:
A refrigerator using Sure Chill Technology accesses grid energy and/or solar power when the energy is at its cheapest and most available. If the energy rate is too expensive at a certain time, the solar powered refrigerator can hold out for up to 10 days without using any electricity at all and still maintain a low, cooling temperature. How? It uses a high-density polyurethane foam as an insulator and a phase change material to store energy until it’s needed. So if the temperature rises too high, that stored energy kicks in and cools the refrigerator down.
The solar powered refrigerator keeps everything inside of it between four and six degrees Celsius (39 and 43 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s not widely used at the moment as far as residential use. But Unicef and the World Health Organization (WHO) are already using the solar-powered refrigerator to store vaccinations in remote areas of Africa where they would otherwise not have a place to store vaccinations.
Photo credit: True Energy
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