On sale and an additional 10% off for veterans appreciation.....sounds like a good company to patronize. :thumbsup:
~ Chance
~ Chance
If I were buying a new fridge I'd pass on all of the current mass offerings. I would want one that will save as much energy as possible over the course of its service life. I would also like one that may be powered from a modest solar array and one that is designed to hold up better during power failures. I would want a fridge designed for the problems, limitations and uncertainties all around us in the 21st century.
So called "energy efficient" or "green" fridges only exist in the minds of the ad men that work for the big appliance manufacturers. This is why a photo voltaic array big enough to power some of the things you need and a so called "green" refrigerator is such an expensive proposition that most can't afford to go that route.
The fact that all of the energy efficient fridges offered have vertical doors that dump the cold out on to the floor each time they are opened indicates to me that very few consumers (and none of the manufacturers) are even near serious about saving money on energy for refrigeration.
The best answer for now is to buy an energy efficient chest type freezer and swap out the thermostat with one that will turn it into a chest type fridge that won't waste so much energy every time the door is opened. The chest fridge linked below will only draw 0.1 kWh a day (no typo):
http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html
Aside from being a snap to run on PV it also has much more temp stability than one with vertical doors and that has to translate into better food storage.
A guy in Oz sells a thermostat for just this purpose for ~$150 which you should recoup pretty quickly since this chest fridge only costs about $5 a year to operate. It should also be mentioned that this is not a new idea. I found this same guy selling these same thermostat kits years ago for the same price.
Check it out.