With all this new power, you’d think it would go to my head!  And I would step on the little people if there were any nearby…oooooh, the power!  But there aren’t any and worse, it is not that much more power.  Not really.  I now have 2100 watts instead of 640 so – relatively speaking – I HAVE MORE POWER!  But that is like going from a 3 speed bike to a 10 speed, really. Hardly a threat to world peace or even little people.

But I have been dreaming of where to spend it all…………….and Sal and I decided to expand our food storage capacity by getting another fridge.  That should mean being able to limit our trips to town to monthly, maybe even every five weeks.

So, I looked at fridges on the net and what a depressing scene that is.  Energy Star means something but not much.  As a continent-wide program it has made appliances more efficient but, of course, they just built them bigger (Jevon’s Paradox) – the more efficient we become, the more we consume).

And the craziest thing is that the companies themselves set their own rating!?  That means that LE or Samsung can state that their ECO-friendly EnergyStar 22 cu ft fridge only uses say, 600 Kwh a year which may even be true.  But they are ones claiming it.  And some of them have already been proven to lie by Consumer Reports.  So, if you can’t trust EnergyStar, who can you trust?

Well, SunFrost is still the acknowledged king of the ice cubes but some makers are claiming that they are close.  I dunno.  So, I looked up the views of the whacko’s on the net and YOU-Tube and, it seems, the most efficient refrigerator is really a converted chest freezer.  Install a more attuned-to-your-needs temperature control device and you can get your fridge-cum-freezer to operate on something like .1kw a day!  That is one tenth of what a normal 15 cu ft fridge uses.

My new power array allows me to ‘spend’  say .75 kw a day extra and so I could add a whacko free-ger-type box and still have enough juice left over for a half size full-on freezer if I wanted and I would still save on power.

So, this little exercise in expanding our power consumption may yield a horizontal fridge.  Who knew?

In the meantime, the batteries are up.  The batteries are up!  The batteries are happily UP!!!  And so am I.  All this new power is burning a hole in my pocket.