Why would anyone live without a refrigerator? Because refrigerators need POWER, and you may not have enough of it.

• Maybe the power is out in your neighborhood.
• Maybe you’re just starting to build, and you don’t have power yet.
• Maybe, like us, your current system does not produce enough power to run a refrigerator 24/7.
• Or maybe you don’t have a refrigerator because you can’t afford one right now.

However you got here, you’re not alone. I’ll share how Lurko and I managed to live without a refrigerator for over six months.

Why We Did It

In our case, Lurko and I have a perfectly good refrigerator that we brought with us from Texas.

But we live off-grid in Mexico, and we rely on solar power. On a clear sunny day, our seven panels make over 20,000 watts of power, which is more than enough to run a refrigerator. Unfortunately, we could only afford one 5000 watt battery. Five thousand watts is enough to run the inverter, the fans, and the Starlink all night. We learned the hard way that five thousand watts is not enough to add a refrigerator. We tried. It worked great until about 4am when the battery alarm beeped frantically. That’s the “Help! I’m only at 20% power!” alarm. Lithium ion batteries can’t run below 20%, so running a fridge all night was too much for it. We had to shut down the whole system, pull out our tiny battery-powered camp fans, and wait to turn on the main power until we had enough sunlight.

What We Tried

We tried only plugging in the refrigerator during the day, and at night we bought a block of ice to keep in the freezer. Every day, we moved the perishables from the fridge to the freezer, which essentially became an overnight cooler. Then in the morning, we’d plug in the fridge and move the food back in. We did this for a few weeks, but it was a huge hassle to remember to do this night after night.

Also, the constant plugging and unplugging and ice melting was not great for the fridge, and soon it no longer turned on when we plugged it in. Our fridge was dead.

Luckily, this was the cheap used refrigerator that we bought as a temporary solution while we waited for our “real” refrigerator to arrive on the trailer from Texas. Since I hate throwing things away, it got a second life as a pantry and now serves us well in this role. But once again, we were without a refrigerator, and even after we finally picked up the trailer with all our stuff, we couldn’t use our working fridge until we could afford a second battery.

So, we had to learn how to live without a refrigerator.

How We Did It

1. Avoid buying food that needs refrigeration.

Whenever we made our bi-weekly tips to the grocery store, we really paid attention to buying food that was shelf stable. Canned foods, bulk dry goods that we could store in plastic containers. In Mexico it’s easy to find the milk that comes in boxes. There’s some stuff that you have to refrigerate once you open it, but until you do, you can stock up and it’ll stay good for months. An example of this is whipping cream, which I have actually ordered from Amazon.

There is also a powdered cream, which I have not tried yet, but I’ve tried other powdered foods from Hoosier Hill Farms and their stuff is decent.

2. Learn which foods actually need refrigeration.

This was interesting, because SO many things that I used to refrigerate in the States do not actually need to be refrigerated. For example:

• Eggs. Here in Mexico, no one refrigerates them. You don’t have to! Our eggs come right off the farm and aren’t washed and processed like they are in the U.S. We buy a flat of 30 eggs and they stay good in the pantry for up to three weeks. (If you’re in the States, keep in mind that if they’re refrigerated in the store, they need to be refrigerated at home.)
• Butter does not have to be refrigerated, nor do hard cheeses. However, during the summer it gets *really* hot here and that stuff will melt, so it’s better to refrigerate those things if you’re not going to use it right away.
• I have had good luck with peanut butter. The internet gives conflicting advice, but science (and my experience) says the oils act as a preservative and it will stay good for three to four months after you open it. I hear it can go rancid in hot weather, but we go through it quickly enough that it’s not been an issue.
• Produce. I used to refrigerate everything, but the rule of thumb is: if it’s not refrigerated at the store, you don’t have to refrigerate it at home. In Mexico I get berries and lettuce from the refrigerator, but things like tomatoes, limes, avocados, and onions can stay out on the counter. They seem to taste better, too. I have also tried the trick of storing lettuce stem down in a cup of water. It seems to work if I’m only doing it for a few days, but again, I’m in Mexico and some things don’t last as long, especially in the summer.
• Bread needs to stay out anyway. Chilling it actually changes the texture and makes it taste gross. Don’t refrigerate bread!

3. Use Your Camping Cooler

When you live without a refrigerator, you may find that some foods, like meats and soft cheeses, you don’t want to go without. So we do use a small cooler, similar to this one. During certain times of the year you can find these at Aldi for way cheap. I originally bought it for camping because it was advertised as bear-resistant. No bears here, but it is a tough little cooler that has put up with a lot of abuse over the years. We also have a 5-gallon Igloo drink cooler that we will use as backup if there’s not enough room in the main cooler.

4. Buy Or Make Ice

Because we live without a refrigerator, we have to get ice every day. Especially now, during the summer. It’s pretty cheap in town, 5 kilos for 35 pesos. But I have the advantage of parents with an icemaker in their fridge, so sometimes I pick up a bag from them. If you don’t have friends with an icemaker, you might also consider buying your own countertop icemaker, like this one. We haven’t done this, because having a fridge was just around the corner and we couldn’t justify the expense. But it is an option.

5. Buy Food Every Day

Maybe every other day, if you plan well. The fact remains, due to the limited space in our cooler, there is no buying for three days ahead. Learning how to live without a refrigerator has made us razor sharp in our food planning. When we go out for the daily ice run, we think about what food we need for breakfast or lunch tomorrow and get that while we’re out. A lot of times the only things we need are meat, and whatever produce we want to go with the meat.

6. No Leftovers!

I was once the Leftover Queen, so this was a tough one for me to unlearn. I was used to making tons of food, and then freezing the rest to have later. Well, no freezer, so no more of that! Plus we were dieting, so we were trying to learn portion control anyway. They say to look at your fist…that’s about how much food you should be serving yourself. What helped me a lot was the phrase “medio kilo”. In Spanish that means, “half a kilo” and that’s how much meat the two of us can comfortably eat in one meal. So we got used to saying that to the butcher a lot. The only time it was confusing was when we wanted chicken breasts. It wasn’t practical to measure out half a kilo of breasts, so our butcher would just hold up two halves and say, “You want this?” Sure, close enough.

7. Learn How to Preserve Food

There’s four basic methods of food preservation: freezing, dehydrating, canning, and fermenting.

• Obviously, freezing is out for us.
• Dehydration works about half the time in our wet humid jungle climate. During the “dry season” (November through April), the humidity gets below 65% which we have learned is the maximum to have any hope of drying anything in our mesh drying rack. It is doable, and I will write up the details of our adventures in dehydration.

• Food preservation method #3 is fermenting, which is something I would love to learn more about. So far I have only tried making sauerkraut, and I had one success and one failure.
• #4 is Canning! By far, I have had the most success with steam canning in my Instant Pot. You can read about my foray into canning mangoes here.

8. Grow Your Own!

The goal for a lot of off-gridders is to get as close to self-sufficient as possible. This means growing your own fruits and vegetables, raising chickens for meat and eggs, etc. If you grow your own, you get to harvest and eat it when it’s ready, and that saves trips to the store and the need for refrigerator space.

We are still in the very early stages of self-sufficiency. I have never been a great gardener, and used to tell people I had a black thumb. But I DO want to get closer to self-sufficiency, so I am willing to put aside my old hang-ups and try.

I started out with something REALLY easy: alfalfa sprouts! You just have to remember to rinse the seeds twice a day, and in 3 days you have food. My success with that encouraged me to try herbs and vegetables next, and so far I’ve successfully grown (and eaten) my own basil, dill, and cucumbers. Trust me, if I can do it, you can do it. Some day I would like to try raising chickens, maybe even pigs or goats. But first we need a fence, so critters are going to have to wait. In the meantime, I will keep trying to grow my own food.

It Can Be Done

So there you have it. Using these strategies, Lurko and I have managed to live almost eight months without a refrigerator. Not by choice!! But it is doable. For some families, it is a choice, and more power to them. We on the other hand, do not want to be doing this forever. Having to get ice every day is a pain, and so is having to repack the cooler any time you take one thing out and mess up the ice structure you so carefully built.

We recently put more money down to upgrade our solar system, so the hope is our new batteries will arrive soon and our wait will be over. Looking forward to plugging in our fridge! But until then, we have proved that it is possible to survive off-grid without this modern convenience. Yes Virginia, you can too live without a refrigerator. If you have any questions about how we did it, or if you have any of your own tips, leave a comment! We’d love to hear from you.