How to Build a DIY Walk in Cooler for Cheap

if you're considering buying a commercial fridge for your business your farm if you're a hunter the kubot system is infinitely better more reliable and far more inexpensive and you're going to get Wi-Fi monitoring on your phone so you'll always know what the temperature is at all times so why would you not want a commercial fridge well let me tell you from experience I had one for my Market Garden I would store my vegetables in it before taking it to the market at some point the compressor went out I called a professional to come out he charged me a hundred dollars just to come out and tell me it was broken and that it would cost me another thousand dollars which is basically the cost that I paid for it when that happened to me I searched out Solutions I found the cool bot and modified that little commercial fridge to put in one of these now that worked fantastically in the summer you'd be amazed that an air conditioner can actually keep the fridge at 34 35 36 degrees full even in summer and what's special about about this build versus other ones that you might see online this is probably the most inexpensive build that you're going to be able to find we use all recycled styrofoam for this as many parts as we possibly could that we didn't pay for the most expensive thing was the air conditioner which I think was seven hundred dollars so let's get into the build of this video and how we set this whole room up and then at the end I'll give you guys a ton of tips if you want to do this for yourself how do you figure out the size of the room you need the size of the air conditioner different other things that go in to making decisions about this and if you want to end up buying one I have a 20 off code just click the link in the description and you'll get that so this old storage room was cleaned by Blake and his mom it's ready to go now we're going to do electrical work first before we add our insulation so we're gonna be adding in a couple lights and an outlet box in the location and you also want to think about for your outlet box it needs to be close enough to the air conditioner that the cord will reach usually the cords on these air conditioners are super short like four feet and you want to be directly plugged into an outlet you're not supposed to go through an extension cord to connect it and it's going to be split in the middle of the room here so we've measured that distance and now we just need to do a little bit of math to figure out the equal distance so we can put all the supports in the right place the other thing that we're working on is getting these beams in place and securing them because this is where we'll be hanging the animals so it needs to be pretty strong so we're going to be attaching an extra two by four to the wall here and attaching some brackets to these pillars as well so that they can't shift or move and they'll be locked into place oh it holds success Above This is where the styrofoam is going to be Blake got a bunch of recycled styrofoam that he's been storing for years and turns out this is a great project to use it for it's six and a half inches thick using these boards to Snug up the Styrofoam against the wall worked really excellent and what we did to drill into the studs we just really tried to pay attention to the stud that we could see above before we built it out and just tried to line it up and and made it go in foreign now that we got the window out we need to set up a frame that's going to hold the AC because the hole is much bigger than the AC this is roughly 17 and three quarters High this is 34 and three quarter that's nice so we'll just build this out completely flush up top with wood we'll be able to set this in and it'll rest against the top piece here all right okay guys so on the back of this wall here you can see we just simply covered it up with some wood there's spray foam on the inside now on these on all these ACS there's going to be a little drain plug in the back be sure to pull that out uh so that any excess water will drain out and then you're just going to want to support the back of it now you could you could do it as simply as we're doing here or you could build out a little frame there's many ways that you could do this but you just want to ensure that your AC is essentially level slightly downward so that the water can just drain out easily as time goes on make sure that these fins stay clean and you don't want to ever rub these with your hand you'll bend them it's just like a car's radiator use an air gun or a blower and you can blow this out if it does get Dusty or you can even like on your Ace unit on your house you can rinse it off if it does get too dirty it'll help it to run a bit more efficiently so if you're new to this cool bot system this whole idea of an air conditioner being able to cool a room like this I'm going to give you guys some more details and information to help you figure out your project and if you do end up wanting a cool bot check out the link down below you'll get twenty dollars off if if you do end up purchasing one and also check out the coolbot website because it's going to really help you to figure out what size air conditioner that you need for the room they have all sorts of calculators and FAQs to help you design the room so the first thing that you guys got to think about is what type of insulation do you want to use now this was a super inexpensive build because Blake has been collecting the styrofoam over the years and what you need for these cool rooms is a r value r25 or more and the R value is an insulative value and when you go to any big box store to get your foam board or there's like you're looking at spray foam insulation it's going to have that r value number to build out one of these rooms normally let's just say you're doing this in a garage or you're converting some room you can just attach the phone bar directly to the two by fours in there or you could plywood out the room or you could spray foam all the insides in between the two by fours and have it insulated that way and then put a covering on the outside or like us we have no covering on the inside of this one of the coolest ways I've seen farmers use this for their farmer's market is to have a cool bot attached into a trailer so they can load it up keep everything cool there bring it back home and that's usually done with a spray foam so right now I'm at Tennessee Mountain Farm my friend Blake we do a lot of farming together you've probably seen some of the videos that we've done together and he has a YouTube channel now that you guys can check out we killed my pig here on the property about a month ago uh it was a about 300 pound pig and we hung the body in here to cool the meat down before butchering it went perfectly the coolbot held at Perfect Temperature you know right around 35 and what's cool with the app is you can monitor it or give yourself an alert so let's say something went wrong with the AC which would be crazy rare or you know just something happened where the door got left open and now it's all hot you're gonna get an alert for that so that you can fix it on a commercial fridge you know those don't really have that typically so if your fridge went out overnight you would never know it so to figure out the size of the air conditioner that you need for your room take your room's measurement go to the coolbot website and punch it into their calculator and they'll estimate the size air conditioner that you're gonna need to purchase I definitely recommend getting an LG because it's just higher quality they will last longer and be more reliable and what I love about the cooler system let's God forbid something happens and this breaks what does it cost you to fix it all you got to do is buy a new AC and that's it that's my favorite thing about this so this is a 700 AC let's say 10 years from now this dies the room still intact it just cost you that so because we're hanging up animals in here we had to install these hooks and we still need to modify the system a bit more we need to have a proper pulley in here because when me and Blake lifted this up it was me Blake and his mom his mom had to fit the hook on while we lifted this pig up that's how I know it's 300 or more pounds for the carcass weight because it took both me and Blake's weight to be able to lift to put all of our weight into it so that we could lift it up what they use in a professional butcher shop they have a rail system and the rail system allows them to slide around now you can build something like that easily inside of your cool room how cool would that be that's Something That We're Dreaming of modifying this place for in the future so now let's go talk to the farmer Blake and see what he thinks about the coolbot system and you know building this room and if he has any tips for us that might be helpful yeah as we were reflecting on how to do this room in a better way the mounts right there they're actually on a nut that has a big washer under it and so it's it's not going to come through that 4x4 and if I have a hundred pound pig total body weight you know a six month old five month old that came in at 200 pounds you cut it in half or 100 pounds cut it in half there's 50 pounds to mess it's easy on this that 300 pound pig was so much so much so I'm taking down a chicken house anyway that has these mechanical hand cranks to raise and lower the equipment and we'll be able to bolt those around the 4x4 as well and bring a pig or an animal in on just sort of a metal Gurney hook the crank to that and either with hand or I've got something with a power drill that you can just hook up to the power drill pull the trigger and it'll winch it right up to the top so this is a hand winch if somebody wanted to look that up yeah that but other than that you know just look around and see what you got to use make sure you can stop all the air cracks and foam worked great for that we thought the tape was going to be the trick on it but really foaming all the stuff was better okay and then you know honestly with coolbot being able to get the alerts on the phone and be able to log in at any point in time and just see how it's doing that's been fantastic yeah I'm looking at what Cliff Davis is now producing of these age three-year hams it's prosciutto and and looking at this room and after we get through the summer season just to see how it's all going to keep up and what improvements to make but if I could get a place to put hams for three years oh man it's a nice long-term project after that so I'm looking to see what those things are but that's why I think I can use this for is I never thought of being able to really age a long-term product like that but now it's possible with yeah with minimal minimal inputs I have not noticed I don't know much at all on the power bill in the last little bit since that's been in there so it's easy to operate it's nice to have so you might notice that there is no door on this thing and that's because we've just been using thank you this styrofoam piece and we prop it up against the door right this is very low budget very inexpensive we could totally frame out and build a door into this there's nothing stopping us from doing that and we might do that in the future um but Blake just wanted to keep this build more inexpensive and just get it done so we can start using it in the summer we may find out that we do want to make sure this is more secure just because of the heat making sure we're not you know letting in excess heat through little cracks or something but that's something we'll determine later and that's something I'll do an update video when we upgrade this thing further into the future I'll show you guys what we've done and how we've modified it to make it a bit easier to work with meat so here's the actual coolbot itself very simple device and when you're installing it there's two temperature probes so there's the temperature probe that will measure the room and then it says room then you have one that says fins this will go inside of the fins that's measuring the temperature that's coming straight out of the air conditioner your little heater probe that probe is connected to the temperature probe of the air conditioner tied together with some aluminum foil and that tricks this into thinking that this room is always really hot so it can run at the lowest temperature if you have the Wi-Fi enabled coolbot there's a little jumper cable that connects to your box right here that controls all the Wi-Fi uh one of the most important things to remember when you're building this you want to make sure that you have a good Outlet a 240 Outlet depending on how strong of a air conditioner you buy the most ex the most powerful ones might need a 240. so make sure that your electrical is set up correctly make sure the amperage on your breaker is set up correctly and the size of your air conditioner is going to determine that let's say you do want a commercial fridge or something that's really professional kubot now sells these full rooms built out ready to go set up and they will ship it to you so that is another option if you want to go more professional and have something that will stay more inexpensive because of the AC unit and has that ability that if something does break on the AC you can switch it out with another AC rather than dealing with the complicated and expensive compression systems that are on all these commercial fridges and if you're doing this for a business you have to take temperature logs right well how cool is it with the Wi-Fi enabled you can download all these logs so you don't actually have to record anything it would all be the accurate log from the machine itself

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 36,115

Keywords: walk in cooler, homesteading, coolbot, how to build a walk in cooler, how to build a coolbot cooler, how to set up coolbot, nature's always right, diy walk in cooler, walk in coolers, walk in fridge, commercial refrigerator not cooling, diy commercial fridge, steven cornett, grow your own food, market garden farming

Id: ds4eDZcqN14

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023