Home / Uses / Protecting a general store's freezers in a blackout

Saving the frozen stock at the general store

The general store in a small town carries milk, meat, ice cream and the bait freezer. When an outage runs for days, that stock is the first casualty. Here is how a 15 kW system could protect it.

Why freezers are the real problem

A row of upright display freezers, a couple of chest freezers, the walk-in chiller with milk and the bait freezer out the front can all be lost in a single long outage. Each one draws modest power, but their compressors start together when the power returns, which is exactly when old generators stall. A battery and inverter with peak headroom handle that start-up surge, and the fuel cell keeps them running after that.

What it would keep running

Upright and chest display freezers
Walk-in milk chiller
Bait and ice freezer
Till, EFTPOS and router
Shop lighting

Keep trading, not just keep cold

A store that stays open in an outage becomes the town's supply line. Lights, the EFTPOS terminal, the till and the router are small loads that fit easily beside the refrigeration. Because the switch-over is instant, nothing resets and the till does not lose the sale in progress.

People turning up for candles, batteries, gas bottles and bread will find a shop that is open and lit, rather than a dark doorway with a handwritten sign. In a small town that can be the difference between a long outage being an inconvenience and a genuine scramble for food.

How it works →

The H2OME loop: an electrolyser splits water into hydrogen, the hydrogen is stored in a tank for weeks, a fuel cell turns it into electricity for your home, and the water returns to the loop.

Where the cost lands

The system charges overnight on off-peak power and stores hydrogen at 30 bar or less, where it keeps for weeks. The round trip is 30% or less, so every unit out costs more than three units in. For a store, that is the price of not throwing out a truckload of stock, and the pilot would weigh it honestly against the losses a store actually has.

Questions

Can it restart all the freezers at once?

The LiFePO4 battery and 15 kW hybrid inverter are there for exactly that kind of start-up surge. A very large walk-in freezer plant may need staged restarts, which is something the pilot would set up rather than leave to chance.

How long will it keep the freezers cold?

It depends on how much hydrogen storage is fitted and how full the freezers are. The hydrogen keeps for weeks without losing charge. We will size run time to the store rather than quote a number now.

Could a smaller battery do the same job?

For short outages, maybe. Batteries alone run down in hours under freezer loads. Hydrogen is for the long ones, where a battery would need to be enormous to last days.

Elsewhere

Every use →

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