Old Walk-in Cooler (Repurpose or Sell)

Hi all!  With the purchase of our land we inherited a walk in cooler.  It is separated into its various parts (sides, floor, etc) and I have not tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together to verify all of the shell exists.  The various pieces appear to be in decent condition.  I'm wondering if I should try and sell this to get some cash or if there is a better creative use for this.  I have been thinking of using it for things like a mushroom cultivation "box", or something like a seed vault.  We have an old root cellar on the property and I also though about putting the cooler together inside the root cellar to provide for extra protection against varmints while reconstructing the root cellar, which is somewhat in shambles (needs new roof).  

I really could use the extra cash but I have no idea how much I could get for something like this.  

Thoughts?

Frank

Hi Frank! I have a couple ideas. Not knowing what you plan to do with your new land or if you plan to raise animals, the walk in cooler could be utilized as a meat locker. For example, if you raised cattle and wanted to process your own beef, entire sides could be hung in the cooler to age 21 days or so before butchering into individual cuts of meat. Another example, if you want to raise pigs, dry cured sausages could also be done in the walk in cooler as well. Humidity control needs to be considered for such endeavors, but is not difficult to do. Also, an enormous variety of cheeses could be aged in such a temperature and humidity controlled environment as well. So many possibilities!

Hi Frank,

I don't know if you would like to have a large cooler personally or not, but the product I am going to share with you will help you to do that cost effectively.

The Coolbot is a product which allows a standard window air conditioner to be tricked into operating as a refrigerator compressor.  You can find info on it at www.storeitcold.com .   For a fraction of the cost of installation, maintenance and operation of a standard cold room refrigeration unit you can do the identical job.  The coolbot costs $349 and an AC unit to use with it is between $250 and $600 depending on the size of the cold room.

What I have done at my house is to create a 3 stage cold room/root cellar.  The first room is roughly 5 feet by 5 feet and is our walk-in refrigerator.  It is connected to a room with dimensions of about 5.5 feet by 5 feet and finally to a 3rd room which is about the same size as the second room.  All three rooms have open rack shelves in them for food storage.  The AC unit is in the first room as it is the coldest room and we keep the temperature at about 37 degrees F.  The rooms are well insulated (~R30+ on the walls and ceiling and R10 on the floor.  They are interconnected with the plastic curtains used for freezer units to separate the spaces and keep most of the cold in the colder rooms.  The 1st and 2nd room are connected with a double wall curtain and the 2nd and 3rd room with a single wall curtain.

The temp in the second room is typically between 40 and 45 degrees F and the 3rd room is usually between 50 and 55 degrees F.  The third room has both and inlet and outlet ventilation and the other two rooms just have outlet ventilation.  I have pans of water in the warmest room for humidity.  The cold migrates from the coldest room to the warmest and the humidity migrates from the warmest to the coldest.  Of course when the humid warmer air gets colder the amount of water in that air has a proportionally larger effect on the air in the colder spaces.  The fine tuning process is still in progress on the total setup.  There is a fourth room which is also insulated that acts as a foyer between the outside air and the cold spaces.  It stays cool (air-conditioned temps) and both the door to the outside and the door to the root cellar are insulated.

This room was built into a north facing room that the previous owner had built under part of the deck.  I first insulated the room with fiberglass batt insultaion to R13-16 and then used a vapor barrier.  The inner rooms were insulated between R20 and R30 in addition to the exterior insulation.  The inner insulation was done with used high density foam insulation that was re-purposed from chicken coops.  We have lots of old chicken coops here in Arkansas.

We now have really great storage conditions for our produce.  Plus is is really nice when I want to for example brine a turkey.  I can simply put it into the container with the brine solution and put it on the floor of the refrigerator room.

If you have any questions, fire away.

Sincerely,

Ralph

Frank White: Welcome to Permies!!
I wish I had your dilemma!  I absolutely would not sell. it. It's worth more than you will get for it. The previous posters have excellent ideas. I suggest if you can just holding onto it for a few years before you decide, because I know I could think of a LOT of uses for it, and I'd LOVE to have one, and it would suck if you got rid of it and a few years down the road, when you have learned more about what you are doing, regret tossing it.

The technique in Ralph Kettle's post about cooling it works really well, so non-functional electrical parts is not a problem. The case and structure are the best part of those.

If you do decide to get rid of it, we have a Flea Market Forum, post it there, it's very likely someone local to you will want it. They are INCREDIBLY useful to homesteader types who like to reuse things. If you are within range of me, I'd come get it, and I know I'm not the only one. I have been looking for one.

:D

Further to James's post here is a link to a video many many uses for a cold room.  Of course they are suggesting that your cold room should have a coolbot and I agree with them which is why I have one.

Walk in Portable cooler with coolbot

https://youtu.be/fkE59F5oiqU

Page which shows a range of uses for Coolbot (or other) walk-in cooler

https://www.storeitcold.com/top-uses-for-the-coolbot/

Sincerely,  Ralph

Wow.  So many great ideas!  I need to enlist the help of another set of strong arms and see if we can put this thing together.  The Cool Bot answers one of the question I had in my head about how much it would take to climate control the box.  I have a barn where I can store it until its purpose becomes known.

Thanks everyone!
Frank

For those of you who might be interested, I will put on my engineer hat  and tell you very briefly how the coolbot works.

Here is a link for more details and pictures.  https://www.storeitcold.com/how-it-works/

For those who prefer a video to reading :  https://youtu.be/mlLFvND9KYI

The coolbot is a small device shown below in the photo that fits in the palm of your hand at least it fits in the palm of my hand, but then I can palm a basketball.  ;-)

It works by tricking an air-conditioner to running in a manner which its normal a/c controls do not permit.  What the coolbot does to permit this range of operation is they remove the thermostat from the AC coils and attach a tiny heater element to it.  The coolbot also has two temp monitors of its own.  One measures the room temp and the other one the coil temp.  The coolbot heats up the heater loop to make the ac believe the ambient conditions are much warmer than they really are and thus keeps the AC unit turned on full.  The coolbot then monitors the room temperature and provides the cycling on and off of the AC compressor by turning their heater on and off to the ac thermostat.  (When the heater is ON, the compressor comes/stays ON and when the heater is OFF, the compressor turns OFF) The reason for the second thermostat is to prevent coil icing.  When the coil temp gets too cold, the coolbot again turns off the heater to the thermostat thus causing the compressor to shut off and it leaves the compressor in the off state long enough to clear any icing which may have begun.

For those of you who may worry that they are using an AC incorrectly or abusing said AC unit, rest assured this is not the case,  The compressors are quite capable of running over this temperature range and they have 1000's probably 10s or more of 1000's of hours of run time on their units and the ACs work just.  I don't work for the company so I do not have access to the data, but I have had not problems with the coolbot or the AC and I have only seen good reviews on them on-line.

I hope this is helpful.

Sincerely,

Ralph

This will be my final post on this topic unless someone asks a question, but here is a link that anyone who wants to buy a CoolBot can save $20 on their purchase making it $329 instead of $349.  As Paul Wheaton likes to say this is a shameless attempt for me to make a few bucks, but in the process everyone else gets the same benefit of saving $20 when they purchase one of these units.  BTW I first leasned of the CoolBot from the folks that I buy raw milk from.  They have been using a CoolBot to keep their milk cold for years.

$20 off link to purchase CoolBot ----   http://storeitcold.referralrock.com/l/C6BSQBMZ/

Oh my, I have seen a few coolbot installs on youtube recently and they make me envious. I would love to have a cool room- beer vault (i could go back to making lagers!), cheese cave, meat storage (ham!)... if you have neighbors you get along with, this could potentially be a great thing to share.

I have gotten a couple of old walk in cooler and I am wanting to build a garage but I'm kinda hung up on how to assemble it and make it stay cuz they have been out in the weather for some years and some of the latches are all rusted out and with that problem home am I gonna make them stay together

Ralph Kettell wrote:For those of you who might be interested, I will put on my engineer hat  and tell you very briefly how the coolbot works...

Ralph, I know this post is a few years old but if you see this, I could use some help. I'm trying to make a DIY version of the coolbot using an Inkbird ITC-1000 to keep the compressor running when the temperature is above setpoint and a Johnson Controls A19ABA-40C low limit temperature switch to prevent the coil from freezing. I got this to work on a smaller AC but it didn't have enough capacity to cool the room down as low as I wanted. I got a larger AC unit but I'm unsure how to wire it because on this one the compressor is wired into a capacitor and the thermistor is a 28 gauge wire going into a control board I'm worried about frying. I made a post about it here: https://permies.com/t/187503/Voltage-Wiring-Walk-Cooler

Any advice or aiming me in the right direction is much appreciated.

Thanks!

I suspect that the old smaller ac that you had has a mechanical control and that's why you could so easily wire it in.  The beauty of the Coolbot is that it prevents all the problems that you will have if you are able to get your current design to function.   The coolbot has all the smarts to do a defrost cycle and monitor for freezing in your coils.   It is less than the cost of the properly sized ac unit.   It is up to you.   I have too many other things to do when someone else has an elegant solution that is cost effective.

I hope it works out for you