Compact Refrigerators

Can a small fridge be powered 24/7 by being covered in solar panels?

You know the panels you see in a calculator or a solar charging device for a mobile phone, if you covered a fridge as might be used by a single person, as well as some other technical jiggery pokery could it work, be a commercial product?

Public Comments

1. probably
2. No, but its a good challenge. You would need sunshine 24/7 and at a guess, 20 times the fridge area to power it. Ideally the cells would follow the sun, the weather must be great all the time, and you'll need plenty of extra power to charge batteries to power it over night. The solar panels will cost a lot more than the fridge.
3. no. A fridge uses a lot of electricity, you would need a lot of solar panels, solar panels are not cheap, and the crunch is, the sun doesn't shine at night. If you think about it, if it could be done it would have been done by now. but as yet its cost prohibitive
4. Sure, if it's on the roof, or someplace else where it will be exposed to direct sunlight. The little panels you refer to won't do. The idea is to have a panel suitable to your needs, that is, capable of collecting enough solar energy to be stored in what will then be a battery that provides you enough voltage/current to power the device you have in mind. You will want to choose between a device for personal use and one for commercial applications. Obviously, the design will have to take into account the amount of electrical energy you want to be available to whom.
5. Well the sun does not shine 24/7. And even if it did a photovoltaic collection area the size of a small fridge would not generate enough power to run the fridge. But you could have a panel array that would be big enough to power a fridge, and charge batteries for powering the fridge at night - But such an array would be covering the roof of your house, not the top of a fridge.
6. This sounds impractical, considering the way normal refrigerators are opened and closed many times a day. There are excellent insulating materials today, and it is possible to build a refrigerator-sized box that will keep ice solid for a month with no energy input at all, in shirtsleeve weather. All one would need to do is hook up a small cooling unit to such a box, and eventually it would reach refrigerator temperatures. That cooling unit could be powered by solar panels, and only a few hours a day. The problem is, once someone opened the door, it would take a long, long time to cool down again.
7. Yes, but you want the panels in the sun and the fridge in shade. It's a common setup in an RV. But you do need batteries. The technologies are better deployed if they are not combined. They won't likely break or wear out at the same time.