Building a 100 Year Refrigerator

[IdleMind]

Your project is quit interesting, especially using passive heat exchangers and 3/16 tube. Last year I built a small 2.5 gal heat pump water heater. My original intent was to submerge the evaporator in a 5 gal bucket of water and use that as the heat source. Since the total demand for hot water was small there would have been enough recovery time. I never got it to work and finished the project with a typical fan and heat exchanger from the donor dehumidifier. I am currently working on a second one and will be doing some experiments with a passive heat source/evaporator. So I will be following your work.

I was considering 3/16 tubing because I wanted to make some small bend radii, but gave up on it because it's expensive. I also think that 3/16 tubing will reduce the total internal volume of a system and that will improve the pumping efficiency. My thinking is that each revolution of the pump pushes a small volume of gas into a big volume of gas and the pressure increases in some relationship to the ratio of those volumes. Anyway, I was wondering if efficiency was part of you reasoning for 3/16 tube.

I had a hard time visualizing what you were working on, it eventually came to me. For those who aren't familiar with old stuff here's a link to an image of an old refrigerator, I believe this is a similar concept to yours. A beautiful wood cabinet old time refrigerator is a unique project.

http://media.oldhouseonline.com/wp-c...top-fridge.jpg