Pantry Cooling Project: What's Next?

Our objective with the pantry project is to improve food storage conditions. About a year ago, we started giving this a good think because after we quit air conditioning, the pantry became the warmest room in the house. Doing something about that has meant a feasibility study, analysis, researching alternatives, and formulating a plan:

1. ✔ Moving the freezer and auxiliary fridge out of the pantry.
2. ✔ Replacing the old upright auxiliary fridge with a chest fridge.
3. ✔ Putting the freezer and chest fridge on solar energy. 
4. ✔ Replacing old pantry windows with energy-efficient windows.
5. ✔ Add insulation to the pantry walls.
6. ➡ Cooling the air in the pantry without air conditioning.

Steps #1-5 of our plan checklist are completed (they’re linked to take you to their respective blog posts). Already, they have made a difference! The pantry is no longer the warmest room in the house, but even stays a couple of degrees cooler than the kitchen, with the bonus that it isn’t as humid!

Now, we’re contemplating #6. As a baseline, I’ve been keeping track of temperature highs and lows in three places: our shaded outside back porch, the kitchen, and the pantry.

The pattern is that the outdoor high is about 8 degrees or so higher than the kitchen, and the kitchen  is about 2 degrees higher than the pantry. So there is typically a ten degree difference between outdoors and the pantry. The question is, can we do better? Can we bring the pantry air temp down a little more? I listed quite a few ideas in this post, with some being more realistic for us than others. Dan has been researching and collecting more ideas, and he’s ready to experiment with some of them. If something works, I’ll let you know!