Ron and Kathryn Khosla have owned and operated Huguenot Street Farm in New Paltz, NY since 1999, running a 200-family CSA plus fulfilling orders to several restaurants and one grocery store.
Small farmers learn the value of money the hard way - literally pulling it a few cents at a time from the ground - so the idea of spending $3,500 on even a used walk-in cooler just wasn't appealing. Ron is also very much a “do-it-yourself” person, and didn't want to become reliant on a repairman who charged $80 an hour (including driving time) to install and then repair a normal walk-in cooler compressor every time something happened.
Lots of research and talking with friends and at conferences lead him to make numerous direct modifications of air conditioners to see if they couldn't cool a room down enough to store vegetables. Several air conditioners gave their lives to initial trials - and some of them sort of worked. But none well enough. Changes in outside temperature and humidity or in the amount of food being stored (and its starting temperature!) were always a problem, requiring constant and often costly fiddling or the whole thing would freeze up! And he could never get the temperature down THAT much.
Now, admittedly Ron kind of enjoyed the quirks and fiddling because each A/C unit sort of became like his baby. That... and he kept thinking about all the money he was saving by not having bought a “real” walk-in cooler compressor! But Kathryn, representing the more practical side of the family, wasn't all that impressed... And she had some good points. They would fill the cooler with hot vegetables - and come back the next morning to see that the A/C had frozen up completely, meaning no cooling took place. A couple days later, yellowed kale and limp lettuce were on sale or pushed on the CSA members with apologies.
The losses in each case could be hundreds of dollars in produce plus time to pick through it, not to mention the frustration of the customers who expected higher quality produce!
The other annoying thing was that the modifications voided the warranty on the A/C unit, which really bothered Ron! Current warranties on Energy Star A/C units are 5 years - who wants to give that up?!
By this time, the CSA and restaurant orders were enough that buying a “real” walk-in cooler was actually affordable. Certainly that's what any “sane” person would have done, but Ron convinced Kathryn that sanity was overrated. They planted extra vegetables and made sure to harvest closer to the last minute to account for losses. They wasted a lot of time, water and power “hydro cooling” their veggies with well water to remove field heat. And they made sure to triple and quadruple check that the cooler hadn't frozen up, upping the temperature if it did (which meant more wasted time).
In the meantime, Ron kept fiddling, spending hours and hours over weeks... then months... then years, shivering in his cooler (on the good days anyway) trying to understand exactly how to keep it running consistently cold. He had important parts of the problem solved, and he found he could get any standard air conditioner over 12,000 btu's to cool a (correctly-sized) room down even to 32 degrees, but only if he was standing right there manning controls the whole time. Not a terrific solution (though sometimes it felt like it when outside temperatures were in the 90's).
Finally, he elicited professional help to permanently and perfectly solve the remaining problems. The solution was today's CoolBot which has a microcontroller "brain" programmed to control any off-the-shelf air conditioner to automatically make the decisions Ron figured out sitting in the cooler when Kate was out working the fields.
The final version of CoolBot now available for sale has been tested on numerous brands and powers of air conditioners, from the late 1970's Carrier Corporation to the most modern Energy Star compliant LG, Fedders, GE, Kenmore, Frigidaire and more!
Better yet, you don't have to make any warranty-voiding modifications to your air conditioner, and you don't need to hire an electrician or cooler-compressor professional to install it! Try it RISK-FREE for 35 days to see for yourself that CoolBot is Cool!
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