Posted on 06/24/2018 8:12:43 PM PDT by Jonty30
The Weltevree Groundfridge is an ingenious way to provide an affordable, insulating, cooling and storage system for wine, fruit, vegetables and cheese. The pre-fabricated cellar can hold as much as 20 refrigerators without the use of electricity and uses the insulating effects of the soil and water to keep the temp at between 50° and 53° degrees Farenheit (10 and 12 °Celsius) throughout the year.
Hmmm, wonder how long it'll take to break even... 16,000 divided by 98... In a little over 163 years I'll break even... yep, might get two...
I think this is designed for the wealthy prepper who wants “only the best” ;-)
“$16,000 to buy this baby... and I’ll save 8 dollars a month by not running a fridge? “
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LOL There’s a sucker born every minute !!!!!!
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You mean the ‘more money than brains’ type?
We had orchards on the farm. The apples were stored in an apple storage bin which was 30 feet underground, solid concrete walls 3 feet thick. After the orchard business went out, we converted it into a bomb shelter coz it had 12 feet of dirt on top of it.
I was doing a job in a commercial wine cellar. Climate controlled building with storage units for rent so folks can keep their fancy bottles of wine stored properly.
I imagine at $16,000 this cellar is probably geared for that market, rather than Ma and Pa Johnson to keep their vegetables in. And environmentally friendly for the uber-liberal-rich.
For meat it would need to be an ice house/ice cellar rather than a simple root cellar. Mount Vernon and Monticello had ice cellars.
Then around 1800 Frederic Tudor of Boston pretty much invented the ice shipping business and sent blocks of Massachusetts ice all over the world. Ice houses went from being cellars to being above ground brick or stone affairs.
Well, I was going to say ‘the obsessive type’ - but yours works, too ;-)
For a whole lot less you could set up a solar rig that could run more than a refrigerator in a power outage - and build a traditional cellar, too.
Wasn’t he Tasha Tudor’s ancestor?
They found my Gammy’s root cellar. They are genius! Just a couple hundred years too late.
Her great grandfather
She was a pretty self-sufficient lady herself.
One of the reason the uber liberal rich have wine cellars is to show them off... it's more a status thing than just a place to keep wine. This thing is waaaay too utilitarian to pass the phony snob test...
If the floor was larger it would be an awesome place to sleep off a hangover.
In Humboldt, Saskatchewan I can get this little sucker (or a reasonable facsimile) to run between 28 and 35 degrees (Fahrenheit)
When its forty below, °C or °F, we get into the fridge to warm up!
Great idea, they used to call this a root cellar. I live in central Texas. The ground water temperature from my well is 73 degrees. This concept would be useless where I live.
That thing looks like a mutant bathtub,
Once you get below the frost line the temp doesn’t change.
The Romans knew this and created air conditioning. This is not anything new.
The husband of one of my cousins has been installing a variation of this for 30 some years that uses the constant soil temperature as a heat sink for a heat pump HVAC system. It uses a closed loop of larger diameter tubing buried sufficiently deep to be below the frost line and where the soil is essentially a constant temperature and infinite heat sink. At the heat pump end of the system, the normal air to liquid refrigerant heat exchanger is replaced by a liquid-liquid heat exchanger. So in the summer the heat energy is dumped back into the soil and in the winter heat is energy is recovered from the soil. The net effect is a radical decrease in heating/cooling cost and a nice return on investment.
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