Step One: Have an absent neighbor with a refrigerator.
For a couple of years after we put that big fridge in Ian’s Cave I ignored it. I’d gone so long without refrigeration that I was used to living without it. When you’re eating super cheap, with bulk food from buckets and veggies from cans, you don’t need refrigeration. But my cheap margarine kept melting into rancid vegetable oil, so that was out, which made bread a lot less useful. And my drinking water got hot in the afternoon, making it unpleasant to drink, so dehydration was always a thing. Winter without a fridge is no problem but in the summer a way to keep food – or at least water and condiments – cool has a dramatic effect on how unpleasant day-to-day life is.
And then one day, somebody was throwing away a picnic cooler.
And I thought, “Hey.”
“What if, instead of throwing away those juice bottles, I filled two or three of them with water and froze them in Ian’s freezer?”
I walk back and forth past his place a couple of times daily even if I’m not doing stuff there. And as simple solutions to problems I didn’t even know were bugging me go…
…that one turned out to be brilliant.
Dos Equis!!! Mothers milk.
One apartment dweller long ago used this method, a small under counter dedicted freezer used to freeze free soft drink bottles for a small chest cooler kept near in a micro sized kitchen (the reason why a standard refrigerator was ruled out from beginning). Being a single person, it worked great for him.
You could always try this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nctr9xJIxUs
Understanding that it’s easy to spend someone else’s money, have you looked into the small 12v compressor fridges-the ones that look like over-sized coolers? Would your solar setup support the draw?
Yeah, I got one of those a few years ago. About big enough inside for a couple of beers and a stick of butter, noisy, barely worked. Next to useless. I eventually gave it away.