Camel Fridge: A truly novel, mobile solar-powered refrigerator
One of the monumental health projects of our time has to be the effort to bring vaccines into remote, rural regions of the world. Vaccines must be kept cool, and in remote rural regions where it’s too darn hot to begin with, a reliable source of electricity is usually not a feature.
A Finnish company, NAPS Systems, addressed this need in the 1980’s with this mobile camel-solar-powered refrigerator. This version evolved into a more boring, but presumably more universal system, today’s CFS49IS.
The CFS49IS comprises a 49 liter refrigerator/Ice pack freezer, 4 50W solar panels, and 2 100 A-hour 12V lead-acid batteries. The whole thing weighs about 300kg. And yes, the CFS stands for Camel Fridge System.
CHAPS commented:
Another active project in northern Kenya is working to develop a pack animal vaccin refrigerator that meets the WHO requirements. It can be seen at www.communityhealthafrica.org. We begine testing to the WHO requirements in the PATH (www.path.org) environmental chamber in a very few days.
johnstonekilonzo@yahoo.com commented:
