Interesting. At our family lake house, we've been putting beverages in a net with a rope and dropping it to the bottom off the dock. They always come up cold :)
I got it: build a soda dispenser like in the OP, except make it fill with rainwater, and insulate it. Assuming the rainwater is cooler than the ambient air it should keep the cans cool without requiring power. As a side thing you could attach either solar or wind-power to a peltier to cool the thing even more.
It's tangentially related, but my grandfather used to tell me stories about growing up in Florida in the 30s. He and his brothers used to homebrew beer, and in order to keep it cool while it fermented (and hide it from their parents), they'd burry the barrel in the side of a ditch.
I'd be worried about fools trying to steal my beer - can't see a locking mechanism on that picture. And no, I'm not joking - some retards once stole a whole fridge worth of beer from a friend's terrace.
Hm... Usually we think nordic countries are close to paradise.
But looking at this I might be wrong. Except for murders the crime rate seems to be above US levels.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Denmark/Uni...
Edit: Some of the stats on that site seem to be contradictory, though. So, whatever, I think I need a cold beer now.
Well, he has a point - the Nordic countries are known for vastly lower rates of criminal behaviour and for their civilized treatment of those who do end up in prison. One might say that the risk of being attacked/robbed/stolen from is considerably lower than e.g. in Germany, the UK, or the US.
Given that I don't choose a bigger fridge specifically to store beer in, and I tend to have, say, 4-8 bottles of beer in the fridge at any one time, and I wouldn't store anything else in the fridge to replace it, and a fridge becomes less efficient the emptier it gets ... is this really a good idea?
Maybe it's not built for your home where you have electricity and a fridge. Maybe it's built for your lakeside getaway where you go camping with the family every summer.
I suppose I can but dream :-) Seriously, I didn't mean to sound so negative in that original comment, I just really wanted an excuse to install this in my back garden!
Emptying the fridge may make it less efficient, but it will still use less total energy to cool the smaller amount of stuff inside. The beer cooler will effectively be pumping heat several feet into the earth's crust, but it won't be generating any new heat.
It might be a translation issue, but "well insulated" seems like exactly what you don't want for this sort of cooler. Maybe they mean the top is well insulated while the bottom is not.
That looks cool. But I live in Southern New Mexico.
The soil temperature here gets very hot and isn't near beer cold even 3 feet down. Perhaps I could still use one of these though. As an eco-friendly coffee warmer. Fill it with canned starbucks and off we go!
Depending on location, ground temperature tends to stabilize once you get a few feet down. Here in the northeast United States, it's about 60 F year-round once you get 15 feet below the surface.
I worked for a company that was making direct-exchange geothermal heat pumps for homes - think about a big refrigerator whose coils are buried in the soil.
That's going to vary a lot more by location, and 2-4 feet puts you at much higher risk for your beers freezing (although if you fully load this with beer, you'll have some beers at 2-4 feet anyway). Where I live, for instance, beers will probably freeze 2 feet below ground in winter. But my well is down below 15 feet and is always liquid.
I imagine it would be most useful for people who camp without electricity often. However dry ice is very cheap (like $1/lb cheap) and more convenient (you don't have to dig a hole) so unless you are camping very often or camp for very long periods of time, it would probably take a very long time to break even.
It is a pretty cool idea though, that alone could justify part of the price for some people.
campers? So dig a whole new borehole each time you want to use this? I've never dug a mini-mineshaft before, but isn't that prohibitive amounts of effort ?
It doesn't seem like it would be too bad. If they are in the same spot for two weeks or so then I think it might be worth it. For a week or less then a traditional cooler with dry ice seems like it would be clearly better.
The type of soil (rocky or not) would make a big difference. Though icy ground where this would work best would be the hardest to dig...
if this interests you, you should checkout a Zeer Pot (aka Pot in Pot) refrigerator. No electricity, but does require water and can get down to 43F. http://practicalaction.org/zeerpots
You have to 'charge' the Icyball periodically with a bucket of water and a fire, but they can go well below freezing.
I've never seen a modern incarnation of the idea, even though with some training it could probably be manufactured locally in countries with poor access to electricity. Maybe that is worth looking into... Here is a homemade version that might be the basis for a modern version: http://crosleyautoclub.com/IcyBall/HomeBuilt/HomeBuilt.html
Exactly. The ground is usually 58F. I remember reading about this in a thermal home book. (If you effectively bury 3/4 of your house, you only ever have to warm it to 70F from 58F.)
It's actually somewhat funny. Did they think there were ice cubes under the grass when the designed this?
AFAIK, the ground temperature will be the average air temperature over the year. It's certainly not 58F everywhere, because in Siberia there's permafrost, and in Denmark might likely be less than 58F, too.
Based on quick search, the average air temperature in Denmark is 8-9°C(46-48F)[1]. I suspect that you don't find that cold ground temperatures though. I found some local statistics about ground temperature[2], which shows that even around here the invention would barely work in the warmest months. And I'm living nearly thousand miles northwards from Denmark, from the same source the average air temperature here is -2°C.
I'm just giving this as more nordic perspective, seeing that most HNers probably are from US/warmer climate.
For the purposes of a just-below-the-surface cooler, yes I believe you are right. But my understanding from the book is that if you go slightly deeper, you will get to a somewhat universal soil temperature no matter where you actually are, with extreme counterexamples, I'm sure. The book, on thermal housing, may have been assuming habitable areas, not Antarctica or Siberia.
The 3rd post talks about the variation in temperatures. Seems that once you get to around 30 feet down the temperature becomes constant year round. For Houston the chart says 71 degrees. Because it's that single number instead of a range I assume that's the temp you get at 30 feet deep.
