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Cool Pantries |
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Q: I'm interested in building a place that will remain cool and dry to store canned and sealed food without electricity. It seems a root cellar is too humid. Any suggestions?
Q: I have been at my present home about 18 months. There is a "cold storage' area off the basement and under the front concrete steps. We have had problems with freezing in the winter and too warm and humid conditions in the summer. I am at a loss and the previous owners (the house is 15 years old) had not used the space. It is about 6 feet square and 8 feet high. All the walls and ceiling are insulated with 1 1/2 inch rigid styrofoam insulation and the floor is covered with vinyl flooring. There is a vent at the very top of the room about 8" x 6". This steel vent has a slider in it for opening and closing the vent. The entrance to the room from the finished basement is a doorway with an insulated steel door that is very well weather -stripped. The room keeps things cool in fall and winter but, late spring and summer the room is more humid and warm than outside. I have searched and searched for some wisdom and have been led to this site. Might you be willing to help me? I would gladly pay for your time! I wish to learn that I may some time help another. A: From your description of the room and the conditions that prevail, it is clearly not functioning as one would hope for cool storage. You say that it is under the front concrete steps; are these steps in a location where they receive much sunlight during the day? If they are, they could be storing a tremendous amount of warmth that is slowly being passed into the cool room, even with the rigid insulation. Ideally a cool room is on the north side of a house, where it receives little or no sunlight, in which case no insulation between it and the soil is needed if it is dug into the ground. It may be that you will need to add considerably more insulation against any area that is warmed by the sun. Q: I need advice to make a commercial cold storage building. I want to make it in Bangladesh. A: The only advice I can offer is to consider putting your cold storage facility underground, where the temperature is quite stable year-round. This will reduce the cost of refrigeration. You should probably consult with a local refrigeration expert for advice about just how to do this in your climate. Q: I have been interested in Thermal Mass Refrigerators since reading about them in Earthship Vol. 3, but haven't found much practical information on them out there. If anyone has experience with them, is it worth the trouble of building one, or would it be more efficient to buy a SunFrost or a similar commercial model? A: (David Knapp) If you live in a very snowy area where there is often 4 - 6 feet of snow on the ground in winter, a thermal mass refrigerator can work very well. The snow can be packed into a tank through a roof hatch that far surpasses any relying on chilled air to do the same trick. To the extent that you don't have much snow, one typically makes up the difference with electric refrigeration. After visiting several of them, some successful, some not, we are going to make our life simple by spending $495 (shipping included) for a 12 cu ft AC powered chest freezer that will in 2 minutes convert to a refrigerator that uses less than half the power of a $2000 Sunfrost RF-12 with the addition of an external thermostat control for $75. Then we will build a cold room pantry into the rear berm that typically varies from 40F - 60F winter to summer (fill in the two month appropriate time lag response of course). Having several working examples of thermal mass refrigerators made all of the difference for us in determining how much we wanted to "tinker" with it on a daily basis. The most successful thermal mass refrigerator we've visited is in Steamboat Springs, CO where the snow averages 4 - 6 feet on the ground December to March. A 300 gallon tank is installed into the roof with a hatch that fills with snow. In summer a roof mounted compressor runs off PV power during the day to keep the room at 40 degrees F (+/-). I have photos of the roof configuration with snow hatch lid and vented/covered rooftop compressor. This system works pretty well, but it isn't set and forget it, the owner has put in hundreds of hours into tweaking it into operation, something great for those that like to tinker, not so great for those "Plug and play folks". The best cool room pantry idea keeps things very simple such that there isn't anything to break down or continuously tweak ... and the space makes a great root cellar and cool room storage. The cool room pantry can be viewed in the photo link below located in the north berm of this earthbag/papercrete dome home in Crestone, CO. Crestone has 40 degree F daily temperature swings winter and summer, however snowfall isn't reliable enough to be used consistently as the primary source of cooling. The outside air can vary from -40 to 60 degrees F in the winter, making it tough to build a thermal mass refrigerator that can run unattended. Q: I need instructions to build a food storage room above ground in an existing framed building. I want to frame up a corner of the room. I live in Utah. It can get to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and 15 below zero Fahrenheit. A: Doing this above ground is never as effective as digging into the ground. Is it possible to berm soil around the room? You might read this article for some ideas. Q: We're building a new house with a slab on grade foundation. I would like a root cellar but going below ground would be difficult. Due to the high water table I think it would flood in the spring. A: Depending on the crops that you intend to store, some humidity is a good thing. We are planning to do a cool pantry above ground but are wondering about some of the specifics in building it. We won't be able to berm it with earth very well either. This is too bad, because either berming or digging into the ground is the best way to provide even temperatures above freezing in almost any climate. We live in Canada and it can go as low as -25 Celsius. The usual winter temperatures are between -5 and -12 Celsius. If the cool pantry is well insulated from both the outside and the house are we liable to run into difficulty with freezing? Will we need to supply much heat in the winter? Without the buffering effect of a lot of soil, or supplemental heat, the root cellar will almost certainly freeze. Would it make sense to put our deep freezer in the cool pantry to reduce the cost of running the freezer and provide some heat to the pantry or would that result in overheating in the spring? This might be a solution to keep the room from freezing, especially if it is very well insulated. It is hard to say if it would overheat things in the spring; it might. Perhaps you could partition the freezer from the rest of the cellar in such a way that it could be isolated in case it does tend to overheat the rest of the space. We plan on using the pantry mostly to store vegetables and fruit over the winter and not use it much in the summer. Then overheating in the summer may not be much of an issue. Q: As I would like to build a basement, about 36' x 20', with two cool storage rooms, one for a root cellar and the other for dry storage, for a new 1 1/2 level cabin to be built on top of it. Which materials are recommended and which type of construction is best? There is no clay available here (on the Atlantic island of Madeira, Portugal), nor any strawbales, and the stones are either too hard or too soft. What would be available though with the shortest way of transportation and the least need of processing, would be logs. ( I wondered that you did not include the vernacular building with logs in this website, as they are renewable, if reforested, which is certainly the case here, as they self-seed sufficiently; amongst the most durable types of buildings as well, and when it comes to a healthy indoor climate, they are probably unequaled.) A: The best material to use in building a basement cold storage room would be durable masonry, such as stone, cinder blocks or concrete, or even earthbags filled with local soil. You don't need to insulate such a cold storage wall since you want the natural cool from the surrounding soil to penetrate the room. I would definitely not recommend the use of wood or straw for what you have in mind. I can't imagine that stones could be "too hard" to use for building, as long as you don't have to cut them. The reason why I don't include the use of logs as a recommended resource for sustainable building is that in most situations around the world the forests have been so badly decimated that further harvesting of trees would not be ecologically beneficial. It is true that in some localities, if the trees are harvested in a sustainable manner, then they are a good resource, but this is rare. Especially with global warming, we need to preserve the forests as much as we can to help absorb the CO2. Q: I'm looking at creating a structure that is rectangular in shape inside for an outdoor pantry. I'm hoping to build it separate from the house. A few years ago we had a house fire that destroyed about 2 years of food storage, so want to have some food stored away from the house. My boss talked about using an old fridge or freezer for a root cellar. This is something I'm interested in. A: Very simple cool storage facilities can be arranged with burying a garbage can (or perhaps an old fridge...) Q: I have an old home and want to build a root cellar in the basement which is dirt. Could you please explain how this project should be done. A: There are too many questions about your specific situation to answer in great detail. In general, you need to decide if what you need is a true "root cellar" or more of a cool pantry. Root cellars are damp and cool and are best used for keeping root crops; many other commodities are better off in a dryer atmosphere. It may or may not be appropriate to encourage moisture in your basement; often this is more appropriate away from the house. It is much easier to create dry, cool space in a basement, and for this you just need to partition off where you want the cellar, preferably on the north side of house (in the northern hemisphere), with insulated walls (if other areas of the basement are warmer. It is important to provide entry and exist ventilation in the room. Q: I am thinking of building a cool pantry in my yard, away from the house. Would it be possible to use an underground storm shelter for a cool pantry? It is made of fiberglass, and measures 6'x6'x6'. The walls are 1/4" thick with a reinforced foam core construction. It has a battery-powered fan which provides a constant source of fresh air. Its not very deep though. There would only be 5 1/2" of Earth on on top. The actual specs call for a concrete slab 80"x80"x5 1/2", to hold the unit down in the event of a storm. Any ideas? A: I would think that such a structure has some real potential to make a good cool pantry. It is designed to be buried, is made of materials that won't degrade, and even has built in ventilation. Just how cool it would be, depends on your location. It would help to locate the pantry in a shady area, so the summer sun won't try to heat it. You could also perhaps provide more light-weight insulation over the roof area somehow, such as straw, sawdust, perlite, pumice, etc. Q: When we moved to our old farm, the root cellar was dry and free of mold. We decided to plant all kinds of bushes and plants around it and over the years, the root cellar has become wet and moldy. Did we cause this by introducing plants that sent their roots down and drew the water with them? How can we get our DRY cellar back? A: Hmmm, obviously something has changed, and it could be your plantings, especially if you are watering them where before the area was not watered. Or it might just be some natural change in the migratory nature of your water table...hard to say. Plant roots will go where the water exists, not usually the reverse of this, although roots can eventually open up cracks that will allow water to enter a space. If the area above the cellar is being watered, you might stop this, or diminish it for awhile to see if this helps, depending on how dear your plantings are to you. Another thing to do is make sure that there is adequate ventilation in the cellar; there needs to be at least two vents: one as low as possible and one as high as possible. A true root cellar should actually be rather humid by definition, depending on what you want to store there. Keeping a storage room below ground absolutely dry is not easy. As a last resort you may need to uncover the entire room and seal it with a moisture barrier if you want it really dry. Q: We are are redoing our kitchen and want to look at putting in a cool cupboard, we don't have the space for a root cellar but do have a large space under the floor of the house (approx 1 metre high). However we want the convenience of keeping most food produce in the kitchen rather than under the house. We have heard that all you have to do to keep a kitchen cupboard cool is to connect it to that under floor space or have some pipes into the earth under the house that go up to the cupboard. But we are not sure how to design this, insulate it etc. We have an area in the kitchen for a small walk in pantry and are wondering how we best make one end of this cool? Or should we just look at making a storage area under the southern end of the house space? (we are in Australia!) A: I have no experience with ducting under-floor areas to pantries above them, but in principle I can see that this might work, although I am not sure how well. There would have to be a significant difference in temperatures to make this worth the trouble. I don't think that simply cutting a hole between the spaces will make a whole lot of difference, mainly because heat rises and cooler air stays below, so there would be no incentive for the the cold air to rise. You would need to use a small fan to mix the air, blowing the cold air from below up into the pantry for this to be effective; and probably recirculating the warmer air back down below to be cooled again. The pantry space would need to well insulated from the rest of your house in order for it to maintain a cooler temperature. Making just one area within the pantry cool would be very difficult. We were thinking to have a pipe(s) in at the bottom and a pipe out at the top to encourage air flow, however perhaps a fan would be better. We also considered whether we could have the floor pipe going underground to further cool the air. We have designed the pantry with a cupboard at one end that we will insulate and with a fridge or cool room door on it. Do you think that would work? We have a veggie patch but live in an urban location and don't tend to have heaps of excess produce but I would love somewhere to keep fruit and veggies without using such a big fridge. If you have a duct near the top that exhausts to the outside, this will definitely cause some air movement, with the hot air rising out of it, pulling in the cooler air from below. Having a pipe that enters the basement area and is ducted through the ground (the lower the better) is a great idea. This will provide cooler inlet air and promote circulation. In this case a fan may not be needed. Q: My Pasadena, Ca house was built in 1949 and has a cooler pantry. It has a screen at bottom of the cabinet. House is on approx. 2' raised foundation. No basement. Screen at the top, which goes into the attic. Slat shelves. I am remodeling my kitchen and would like to keep it. However, it isn't insulated. Is there a way to improve this cooler so that it could be used to store fruits and vegetables? If so, what? A:
It would definitely perform better if it were insulated, so if you can incorporate some insulation to isolate the space from the rest of the interior of your house, that would be good. If the bottom screened vent accesses the foundation area and that area is also vented to the outside so air can come through this cooler space, that is good. Also, make sure that the attic also vents to the outside, so you get a positive flow of air upward and out. When it is really hot outside, you could close the lower vent during the day, and that might improve performance too. You could experiment with this to see what works best. |
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Kelly Hart is your host at greenhomebuilding.com. He and Rosana created a large pantry (about 150 Sqare feet) in their earthbag house, which can be seen on this page (above). Kelly has produced a video, titled 
A: We have a large, naturally cool pantry just off from our kitchen, that remains dry all year round. You are right that a root cellar tends to be too humid for storing many foods. It depends on where you are located and the climate there, exactly how to design such a pantry, but in most places in the U.S. you can dig into the ground to attain very stable temperatures that are well below average highs and also well above the average lows. Our pantry (at 8,000' in Colorado) stays between 38 degrees F. and 65 degrees F. It is dug about 5' down into the ground, and then more earth is bermed up over it. There are fresh air inlet and outlet vents that remain open year round. This earthbag structure was sealed with plastic on the outside before being back-filled with soil, so that moisture does not enter the space and it stays quite dry.
