Butchered deer, a wild pig or two, a few goats, sausages from the local butcher's batch day, snapper and blue cod fillets, whitebait if you were lucky. It is food you cannot just buy again, and the work behind it was weeks of trips and hours on the butchery bench. A full chest freezer holds cold for a while with the lid shut, but a storm that keeps the lines down for days will beat it.
A chest freezer is a small, steady load that cycles on and off. Two or three of them in the garage are well within what a 30 to 40 kWh LiFePO4 battery and a fuel cell are designed to keep going. The switch-over is instant, so there is no chance of a compressor stalling on a dip and failing to restart. Hydrogen keeps for weeks in the store, so the backup is ready for the storm that turns up in the middle of the roar.
How it works →
The round trip from grid power to hydrogen and back is 30% or less efficient. Freezers run on the grid every day; the system steps in only when the grid fails, and charges on cheap off-peak power or from a wind turbine or micro-hydro. That makes it a way to protect the meat, not a way to run freezers for less. It also keeps the house going, so the venison stew can be cooked while the lines are down.
Freezers are modest loads, and several can run alongside the rest of the house within 15 kW continuous. The exact number depends on your other loads and storage, which would be checked in pilot sizing.
The aim is that it never sees one. The battery and inverter run in UPS mode, so there is no gap and no restart for the compressor to deal with.
No. Round-trip efficiency is 30% or less, so stored power costs more than grid power. Run the freezers on the grid as normal, and let the system step in only when the lines go down and the meat is at risk.
Pilot installs go to people on this list first. Rural homes, farms and remote sites especially. No spam, no payment.