Is This The Ultimate Off Grid Deep Freezer?

[Music] fancy this is how you turn it on turn on you know and there's a fault light that's just a problem green if it's on there's a drain the plug is in here you're going to pull the plug here's a drain plug so if you need to defrost it kind of basically it's like a big cooler you know drains out the bottom there's no AC plug just like hook it up to a car battery apparently kid thinks she's a chicken so I've been taking a little bit of a hiatus from being in front of the camera so that Jeremy can do all this awesome technical stuff with all of the solar panels and solar installation so if you're gonna come out and say hi to you guys and just like you know I'm still around I'm actually the person behind the camera when Jeremy is doing all of his awesome guru technical stuff but uh you might notice a look a little different future hair why because life's too short I mean the girls like to have a little bit of fun up here so we're just having a little fun with hair color those of you guys who have been following us for a while know that we have not had a freezer since we moved out here at the end of November in 2017 when we moved into this place we had the wood stove running it was really cold and the heat from the wood stove was heating up our refrigerator too much that we had to move it out to the front porch when we moved it out to the front porch the defrost combined with the very cold temperatures made the defrost run all the time and so he kept that freezer completely thought out meaning we couldn't use that freezer now that spring came we moved it back inside but by this point our battery bank is so depleted and our solar panels not very efficient that it was not running our refrigerator very efficiently plus we went through about three weeks where we were in between systems now because of the inverter problems and the controller problems if you haven't seen that video my link to it up above and so we had no freezer or refrigerator and we really kind of missed having having both so getting some sort of a refrigerator and freezer unit up is a top priority for us so how do we get through the winter without having a freezer well one of the ways is because we like to can all of our meats having canned meats allowed us to store those in our pantry we could open those up whenever we wanted to and use those but now that summer is here we like to do a lot of grilling and the downside of canned goods is that you cannot grill them so we do want to have a freezer so that we can purchase meats that can be frozen that we can Grill up or use fresh the other reason that we want to have a freezer is because we are raising Cooney Cooney pigs here these are pigs that are going to be processed by USDA processor in December and what we get from those pigs we are going to sell to friends and family and a couple other people that they might know in order to be able to sell that we need a meat handlers license and to get a meat handlers license you need to be able to store meat at a proper temperature so having a deep freezer is very important for us as a business as well so we looked into a lot of different types of freezers there are regular AC freezers these are the ones that you get it like a Lowe's or Home Depot or Best Buy and then there are DC freezers now the DC freezers are what they consider off-grid freezers what is the difference between the two well a off-grid freezer has more insulation and it's able to run off of a battery bank this is beneficial to us because if we are say wanting to sell meat out of the back of our truck we're able to throw this whole entire unit on the back of a pickup truck with a battery and we are able to safely transport this whole freezer with its contents to wherever we need to go to sell our meat the other benefit to having a DC freezer is the compressor lasts a lot longer than an AC compressor and these things are a whole lot quieter which is kind of good especially when you're competing with noisy chickens in the background so we did like I said we did a lot of research on these we looked to a lot of people who are currently off-grid use and the model button brand that keeps coming up over and over again is the Sundancer 225 litre DC freezer and that's this is the one that we ended up going with there's a lot of great reviews on this actually there's nothing bad about this whatsoever that we found and so this is the brand a model that we went with and right now I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy who is going to talk to you a little bit more about the technical specs and how he is rigging this up and how some of the testing that he's done behind it and how let's turn up horse okay this breeze will run on 12 or 24 volts DC which means that I'll just hook up to a battery or a bank of batteries right now I haven't hooked up to our old system I load tested all the old batteries and kind of tried to figure out which ones might be salvageable most of them aren't any good they're bad terminals or they're dead and four six bolts put together in series so I have a little 24 volt bank that I have the older charge controller and a few of the solar panels hooked up to they're just laying in the yard just to sort of test this and we've been running it for a couple of days I've got it set to to where this will run directly off the charge controller on the load side of the charge controller little motor fuse on it so it seems to be working really well it's been running like I said two days we got some water in here frozen water in here from the monitoring temperature we're gonna start loading it up with meat and goodies and again the reason we picked this one was so that we can take it with us and or we can hook it directly to our new system all I have to do is put in a DC to DC step-down converter to go from the 48 volt system down to 24 if you run this on 12 volts the only real difference is the light is like half as bright inside but the it's super simple it comes with 2 2 wires you know red the black wire just like you'd hook up any automotive gadget in your car like a stereo or something now it is kind of a manual defrost do if you want to defrost it you just you know empty it out cleaning out you can put like a pan of hot water in there to help sort of warm it up and melt the ice off the walls then you just kind of scrub it out and it's got a drain line on the bottom you can open up so you kind of clean it out like you would a cooler and you do that maybe once a year and just to keep it clean and hygienic but so far it's awesome I like how quiet it is I can sometimes can't tell if it's even running but that's it that's a Sundancer DC freezer a lot of these are bad they have bad terminals and the plates are kind of junky but I found four that work these are 6 volt batteries each of these have two both cells and so these 2 volt cells are hooked in series and then each of these batteries are hooked in series and then they're connected to the charge controller which is connected to leftover solar panels that are just laying in the yard and it's working it works pretty good it's a cloudy day it's keeping the battery charged the load is 1.4 amps so this freezer draw is about 44 hours a day of 24 volts it's pretty efficient and our old system is able to run it so so far so good so that wraps up our DC battery powered freezer we are really thrilled to be able to have this like I said not only does it enable us to be able to have fresh meat that we can grill throughout the summer and fall but also it is a business opportunity to for us to be able to sell some of our meat that we are producing here on the farm in some other news we are selling off some of our spring chicks that we had raised this spring some of our door kings they seem to be doing pretty well here as far as sales and we have all those sold except for the two that you hear in the background those guys are going to auction this Thursday this week also we are going to be getting in 25 new chicks and only which a couple are Dorking and the rest are all a new breed if you guys are interested in knowing what other breed we're going to be raising here on the farm stay tuned for that and also I think I'm going to be doing a video on some of the expectations of moving off grade while you guys saw that we installed this amazing solar system that Jeremy had come up with and a lot of you guys are asking so that means you guys have unlimited power right I think we're gonna talk a little bit about that and how that really doesn't mean we have unlimited power so look for those videos coming up as well as some other projects we have going around here and we'll see in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Guildbrook Farm

Views: 390,044

Keywords: guildbrook farm, homestead, off grid, homesteading, self reliance, living off grid, dc freezer, solar freezer, sundanzer, off grid freezer, freezer, best dc freezer, sundanzer review, off grid living, deep freezer, off grid homestead, solar refrigerator, off-grid living, back to the land, guildbrook, chest freezer, sustainable energy, sundanzer solar freezer, off the grid, off-grid, off grid solar, off the grid living, living off the grid, modern homestead, homesteading 101

Id: 2JJHHC5AMAk

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 12 2018