An earth-cooled beer dispenser | Hacker News Reader

An earth-cooled beer dispenser

translate.google.com

73 pointsgcoguiec76 comments

Interesting. At our family lake house, we've been putting beverages in a net with a rope and dropping it to the bottom off the dock. They always come up cold :)

Haha I imagine this works really well in most places. If I tried this in Florida I think I'd pull up a pile of green sludge with my beer.

Use your pool instead of the canals?

Mmmm. 80 degree beer :) Florida pools get very warm.

I got it: build a soda dispenser like in the OP, except make it fill with rainwater, and insulate it. Assuming the rainwater is cooler than the ambient air it should keep the cans cool without requiring power. As a side thing you could attach either solar or wind-power to a peltier to cool the thing even more.

It's tangentially related, but my grandfather used to tell me stories about growing up in Florida in the 30s. He and his brothers used to homebrew beer, and in order to keep it cool while it fermented (and hide it from their parents), they'd burry the barrel in the side of a ditch.

As long as it doesn't eat through the can, I don't see a problem ;).

Because your beverage touches the outside of the can on the way to your mouth?

Just rinse it off first. Most cooler water is pretty gross anyway.

This link created an interesting bug in my FF: https://i.imgur.com/1PZ01Ua.png

Same here. It seems like most or all google translate links do this.

Same thing here. Sometimes I wonder if Google makes certain things buggy in FF on purpose.

The solution is to disable https everywhere (if you have it enabled) and to make sure that you are accessing translate.google.com insecurely.

For what it's worth.

I love this invention. Imagine put one in your back yard and the next time you are holding a party, you can take out your beer like a magic.

But I think compared with the CO2 that comes out from your beer, the CO2 release reduced by saving electricity isn't that much...

The CO2 in the beer is not of fossil origin, so it's not a relevant comparison.

I'd be worried about fools trying to steal my beer - can't see a locking mechanism on that picture. And no, I'm not joking - some retards once stole a whole fridge worth of beer from a friend's terrace.

Probably not such a problem in Denmark...

Where there are no thieves?

No, everyone has plenty of beer in Denmark! ;-P

Well, he has a point - the Nordic countries are known for vastly lower rates of criminal behaviour and for their civilized treatment of those who do end up in prison. One might say that the risk of being attacked/robbed/stolen from is considerably lower than e.g. in Germany, the UK, or the US.

Hm... Usually we think nordic countries are close to paradise. But looking at this I might be wrong. Except for murders the crime rate seems to be above US levels. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Denmark/Uni... Edit: Some of the stats on that site seem to be contradictory, though. So, whatever, I think I need a cold beer now.

Given that I don't choose a bigger fridge specifically to store beer in, and I tend to have, say, 4-8 bottles of beer in the fridge at any one time, and I wouldn't store anything else in the fridge to replace it, and a fridge becomes less efficient the emptier it gets ... is this really a good idea?

P.S. I'm not saying it's not cool, just that I don't particularly see an eco-benefit.

Emptying the fridge may make it less efficient, but it will still use less total energy to cool the smaller amount of stuff inside. The beer cooler will effectively be pumping heat several feet into the earth's crust, but it won't be generating any new heat.

Maybe it's not built for your home where you have electricity and a fridge. Maybe it's built for your lakeside getaway where you go camping with the family every summer.

I suppose I can but dream :-) Seriously, I didn't mean to sound so negative in that original comment, I just really wanted an excuse to install this in my back garden!

What about the people who sit outside with a case of beer in a cooler with ice? Instead of buying a couple bags of ice a month, they use this instead.

Now is it a good idea?

It's big, so you can resupply it every now and then with 20+ beer cans. Basically, it has much bigger buffer than your fridge.

It might be a translation issue, but "well insulated" seems like exactly what you don't want for this sort of cooler. Maybe they mean the top is well insulated while the bottom is not.

Keep in mind its Google's translation, what they probably meant is there will be no dirt on your beer when you pull it out.

That looks cool. But I live in Southern New Mexico.

The soil temperature here gets very hot and isn't near beer cold even 3 feet down. Perhaps I could still use one of these though. As an eco-friendly coffee warmer. Fill it with canned starbucks and off we go!