I live in ontario, canada, and I’m trying to find someplace cool and dark to store some water lily and lotus tubers for the winter.
What I’m reading is that they need to be placed someplace cool and dark and protected from freezing and drying out.
Now I have an old fridge in my garage which I think would fit the bill.
The question is:
Can anyone tell me if a fridge that is not turned on, placed in a garage which is opened regularly during winter, would be able to stay above freezing temperatures for winter?
Has anyone tried to store lily and lotus tubers in this way who could give a suggestion?
Of course not. What makes you think that a refrigerator will keep something warm?
With the exception of a very small warming unit used for defrosting frost-free units and the minimal residual heat produced by the motor, a fridge only has cooling capabilities. If you put it in a freezing environment long enough, the contents will eventually reach the same temperature as the outside. The insulation may delay it a little, but not forever, and certainly not for a season.
I see. I had hoped that since it was insulated, and in a garage the temp inside would not drop below zero. (I live in a townhouse so the only external wall is the garage door).
It you could find insulation that was 100% perfect, and you closed the fridge door when the room temp was what you wanted to preserve, that would work. But no insulation is that good. All you would be doing is delaying the inevitable. It might protect against a rare, quick, overnight freeze with a warmup the next day, but that doesn’t sound like a typical Canadian winter.
If you find that your garage doesn’t get too cold for too long, perhaps storing tubers close to an inside wall might work, where some heat may leak thru. Cover them with a blanket to insulate a little. I do that with soda in my garage in the winter, at least until the very coldest days. You takes your chances.
Or you could build a heater with a thermostat inside an insulated box (modify your old fridge?)
That might keep the temp. above freezing, but the only way to be sure is to measure it over the course of a few winters and see. Perhaps some of your neighbors have lived in the building long enough to know?
Insulation slows down heat transfer (or cold transfer, if you prefer). It does not stop it. Consider putting ice in a fridge, or in a picnic cooler, during the summer. It stays frozen longer than ice just sitting in an open basin, but it doesn’t stay frozen for weeks or months. Eventually the temperature inside your fridge is going to equal the temperature inside your garage.
What you need to know is how cold it gets in the garage. If snow or ice on a car stays unmelted, that indicates it gets below freezing.
Just put an old electric blanket in the bottom. Check once in a while to see how it’s working and adjust accordingly. Or maybe a heating pad. Shouldn’t take much, since there’s so little air exchange. Turn the fridge off, of course.
mangeorge
You’ll have to try it and let us know. If it stays above freezing in that corner–if it’s next to an interior wall or something–it might work. The garage itself is the first layer of insulation, the refrig is the second.
You might keep a thermometer inside the fridge as well, and when it gets really cold, check up on it. Stick an oven-heated brick inside if it approaches freezing, or something along those lines, and you’ll pull through fine.
Another thing that is relavant here, potatoes do not store well in a air tight container. They would soon rot, and you haven’t smelled bad until you’ve smelled rotted potato. They liquify real quick.
The ambient temperature inside a closed, well-insulated container (such as a fridge) will tend towards the average ambient temperature outside of it; during warmer spells, it will be colder than the external ambient temperature, but will undergo net absorption of heat, causing it to warm up slowly; during colder spells, it will be warmer than the external ambient temperature and will undergo net loss of heat, cooling down slowly.
If the average temperature in the garage is below freezing for, say a couple of weeks, then the temperature inside the fridge is likely to drop below freezing too.
Just bury your tubers in the ground for the winter. I imagine Ontario’s frost zone it fairly deep, but you can get by with a shallow hole as long as you mulch the surface with some straw or leaves.
Forgot to mention…my root cellar is nothing more than an old deep chest freezer buried 3/4’s in the ground. I finally figured out that I needed to drill some drainage holes in the back of it, and later added a vent pipe for air exchange. Keeps my roots good through -30 temps.
What Mangetout said. If your garage is attached to your house and is only subjected to icy air when the door is opened for a short while, then I reckon you’ll be OK. Only one way to find out, I guess…
Is there a gap under your garage door? These are built in deliberately in the UK (it’s the law, IIRC) to provide some ventilation so it takes a little longer to choke on your car exhaust fumes. I never keep my car in my garage - a waste of valuable workshop and storage space in the mild UK climate - so the gap on mine is blanked off with a long rubber strip.