Home Solar Powered Deep Freezer

Eighty-eight litres is a working size, not a show size. It is small enough that one person can carry the unit on a hand truck through a shop door, and large enough that a vendor selling frozen packs, ice and a little chilled stock does not have to restock twice a day.

The liner is split by a divider, with a wire basket over one side. That layout is not decoration: the basket holds the fast-moving product that gets touched fifty times a day, and the deep side holds the stock that should stay cold and stay shut. Every time the lid opens, cold air leaves the top layer first, so the goods you touch least belong at the bottom.

The most expensive component in a chest freezer is the part that is not there. A 65 mm foamed wall is the reason this cabinet can hold temperature through a cloudy afternoon while the compressor sits idle, and it is the reason it weighs what it weighs.

We build thin-wall cabinets and we build 110 mm cabinets, and we will tell you plainly that 65 mm is the middle of our own range. It is chosen for markets where the sun is strong, the grid is absent or unreliable, and the unit has to bridge a night on stored cold rather than on stored electricity.

What thickness buys you is time, not temperature. A thicker wall does not make the cabinet colder; it makes the cabinet stay cold for longer between compressor runs. That is the number a shopkeeper actually feels: how long the ice cream survives a power cut, not how fast the unit freezes.

Sixty-three watts is the rated input. Multiply 5.3 A by 12 V, or 2.7 A by 24 V, and you land on the same figure - that is not a coincidence, it is the plate checking itself.

Electricity consumption is declared as 1.21 kW.h per 24 hours. Divide one by the other and you get roughly nineteen running hours in a day, which sounds alarming until you notice what it implies: the declared figure is a hot-room test result at climate class ST, where the compressor is expected to be busy. In a shaded shop at 25 C the same cabinet cycles far less.

Use the plate figure for sizing, not for forecasting. A solar array sized on 1.21 kW.h per day has margin; an array sized on a shopkeeper s guess does not.

The plate says 12 V / 24 V because that is the nominal system the compressor is built around. The controller in front of it accepts 10 to 50 volts DC, which is a different sentence and a more important one.

A nominal 24 V solar bus is not 24 V. At noon on a cold bright day an unloaded array can sit well above 30 V, and by four in the afternoon with a tired battery it can be under 22 V while the compressor is still expected to run. A narrow-input controller protects itself and shuts the cabinet down. A wide-input controller keeps working across the whole swing and only gives up when the source genuinely cannot supply the cabinet.

The practical consequence is that the same cabinet can be connected to a 12 V battery bank on a small shop, a 24 V bank on a larger one, a 48 V bank on a mini-grid, or a mains adapter where the grid is good, without changing the appliance. One SKU, four supplies.

One hundred and five grams is the factory charge. For scale, that is about the mass of a small phone. A cabinet this size does not need more, because the circuit is short and the evaporator is wrapped directly around the liner rather than piped through a fan coil.

The number matters at service time, not at purchase time. A system with a small charge is a system where a leak is found, repaired, evacuated and recharged to a printed value - not topped up until the frost looks right. Any workshop that offers to top it up without a scale is telling you something about how it works.

R134a is a mature refrigerant with a well-understood service procedure and wide availability in most markets. That availability is the point. A cabinet is only as good as the nearest technician who can put it back together.

Two lines on the plate are about safety and conditions rather than performance, and they are the two that get skipped in most product descriptions.

Climate class ST means the cabinet is designed and tested for ambient temperatures up to 38 C. That is a hot-climate product, not a temperate one rebadged for export. It also means the declared energy figure was obtained in a hot room, which is why it looks high next to a European label measured at 25 C.

Protection class III means safety by extra-low voltage: there is no mains potential inside the cabinet at all. In a market where the freezer stands on a wet floor and the operator is barefoot, that is the single most useful line on the sticker.

Look at where a chest freezer gives up. Almost never at the compressor. It gives up at the lid: a hinge that sags, a gasket that hardens, a latch that no longer pulls the lid flat, a liner that cracks at the corner where the hinge pulls on it.

This cabinet uses two metal hinges, a magnetic gasket seated in a channel, and a latch that pulls the lid down onto the frame rather than simply resting on it. The frame is a single piece, so there is no seam for condensate to find.

The hardware is deliberately ordinary. Ordinary hardware can be replaced by any refrigeration technician in your market from stock, which is worth more over ten years than a proprietary hinge that fits perfectly for the first three.

The cabinet ships as a cabinet. It does not ship with a panel, a battery or an adapter hidden in the price, because those three items have to match a site and a budget that we do not know yet.

What you can rely on inside the carton is the cabinet, the basket, the divider, the drain plug and the documents: a wiring diagram on the plate itself, a user manual, and - on request - the refrigeration schematic our service network uses.

Panel, battery and adapter are quoted as separate lines once we know your sun hours and your required autonomy. If you already buy those locally, we will size against what you have rather than insist on our own.

The liner and the shell are clamped into a jig, closed, and the cavity is filled in one shot. The gap between liner and shell is 65 mm, held by the fixture, so a cabinet built on Monday and a cabinet built on Friday have the same wall.

A cabinet that is foamed without a proper jig shows it in three places: a soft wall you can push in with a thumb, a lid line that does not sit flat, and a compressor that runs longer than it should because one wall is thinner than the other three.

Foam is injected and left to rise and cure under clamp pressure. Nothing about this step is fast, and rushing it is how cabinets end up with voids - pockets where the foam never reached, invisible from outside, and visible as condensation on the wall in service.

After cure, the cabinet comes out, the jig goes back into rotation, and the unit goes to assembly for the compressor, condenser, thermostat and lid.