Excerpts from a how-to manual for building a walk-in cooler

I'm trying to figure our cooler solutions for the Green Horse and ran across a primer on the subject that was unexpectedly entertaining. Here are the best bits.

(By Ron Kholsa)

A "down" economy might be waking the rest of the country up to the importance of savings and DIY, but for farmers working on low margins and high risk it's business as usual. Although we still live off the income from our 200 family CSA, I developed and now sell the “CoolBot,” a device that makes a standard window air-conditioner run down to 33 degrees, turning it into a walk-in cooler compressor.

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Which leads to... “Water Falls”! Cold air, like a cold heart, leaves no space for love. When you open the door of your cooler and the warmer, more water-vapor-laden air comes whooshing in, within moments it sadly suffers the pangs of rejection and condenses in tears on the cold heartless walls of your cooler.

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Don't use Fiberglass insulation! I know there are people out there who've done it and seem happy but inside, they are not happy at all and you might want to tell them that. What's happened with them is that (even with a very good vapor barrier) moisture laden warm air from outside somehow found it's way into their walls where it condensed back into drops of liquid on the cool inner wall of their cooler. It saturated the fiberglass batts, reducing the insulation value and ultimately growing a goth-style black mold which dragged down both the spirit and loft of the fiberglass even further until they have whole areas of their walls with gaps in the insulation.

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Here in NY, grungy male farmers who happen to be suffering from tree-allergies and sneezing into their shirts will find that this stuff is cost-prohibitive at over twice the price of the rigid foam products. But if you happen to be a more attractive neighboring female farmer, the same company might spray-insulate your 12x20 cooler for around $100. Go figure. Folks living in the midwest seem to be finding prices are neither gender specific nor prohibitive, so check with your local spray-foam installer.

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Don't cut your insulation up and fit it between the studs! Not only will you invariably leave a few gaps and holes, no matter how careful you are polyisocyanurate shrinks a bit over time, making your kids think you were a sloppy builder when they re-build the cooler 15 years down the road because the cooler costs too much to keep cool!

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Many people just leave the exposed insulation on the inside of their coolers. If you don't have employees and you're careful, that's fine. We have aggressively destructive employees and our cooler is open to a public I seriously suspect to be drunk most of the time by the way they ransack the place so our inner walls are sheathed with $7/sheets of "OSB board."

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We live in a registered historic district and we are often in trouble with the village elders for not taking their “hysterical” district as seriously as we should, but our cheap plywood siding solution (properly stained a dull green) apparently looks nice enough from the road that it's one thing no one has ever bugged us about!