Walk in Fridges.

[Sergroum]

Greetings.

Had a peculiar question asked of me today. I did not have a good answer, mainly because it's relatively outside of what I've ever done.
A client wants to build himself a walk in fridge. A highly insulated metal container of 450 cubic feet with a desire to keep a temperature of 0 Celsius inside.
The question he asked is what would the BTU rating of the compressor need to be.

I just sort of shrugged and said I've never dealt with temperature demands like these. But it got me curious. If I decided to build myself a fridge, what would I need to know?

[rmuntz]

You would have to do a heat load calculation, the most common one is probably the Keeprite version. Just like a house heat loss/ heat gain, it is based on worst case scenario.
The thing to remember with shipping containers, is, they have a huge solar gain in the summer, especially if they are painted a dark colour.