Gas Refrigerator

In a community where I lived for a while and which didn't have electricity at all, most families that felt they really needed refrigeration used the gas refrigerators. But these are dangereous, and a friend of mine's two story house burned to the ground, wasting about two years of his work, from an accidental spark caused by falling rocks, which ignited the gas from a leaky faucet. Luckily, he was away with his family at the time, but it was horrible enough for him, having to rebuild from scratch, with his wife pregnant with their third child.

It's important to remember that most of the products we are usually eaten before they are spoiled, especially if they grow right there in your garden. In addition, certain goat and lamb cheeses can last for a week without refrigeration, even in our summertime temperatures of near 40 or 45 degrees C. Of course, the products have to be kept as far away from the sun or any source of heat as possible. I eventually dug a hole in the ground, in a place that was in the shade of some rocks most of the day, and kept a box in there, covered with about a foot and a half of dirt all the time. In this box, even in the summer, fresh meat and milk survived for about as long as in a regular refrigerator, four to six days. The big problem with this is digging and covering the box every time, so only the really perishable items should be kept there. An actual deep cellar with a regular door, like many villages in Russia use even today, is much better, of course, but requires a lot of hard work to dig and reinforce, so I ask myself if it's really necessary, when most foods are eaten right away, and only slaughtering game or stock animals for meat may cause a problem with perishability.

There are many methods of curing and salting meat and fish so that they keep almost indefenitely after the process, like beef jerky and dried fish, but these are not as tasty. The best is to share a slaughtered animal communally, and finish off all the meat in one or two days. Goats should be milked daily anyway, whether they have a kid or not. After the pole shift it is theoretically possible to construct a simple Gas Refrigerator. But you need to find a lot of metallic junk and know how to make it into the shapes you want, such as hollow tubes and the like. These technological solutions probably won't be worth much in the horrible reality we'll face right after the shift, and definitely long term storage of perishables for the initial time should be considered seriously, as it indeed is being considered here.

Offered by Shaul.