The Story Behind the Invention of the CoolBot

Kate and I (Ron Khosla) started Huguenot Street Farm in New Paltz, NY in 1999, a 250 family CSA with additional sales to several restaurants and two grocery stores.

As small farmers, we learned the value of money the hard way, literally pulling it a few cents at a time from the ground. So the idea of spending $3,500 for even a used walk-in cooler wasn't appealing. I'm completely a "do-it-yourself" person, so I also didn't want to be reliant on a repairman who charged $80 an hour to install and then repair a normal walk-in cooler compressor every time something happened --which is exactly what I saw happening to neighboring friend-farmers.

I got the idea to make an air conditioner function as a cooler from the USDA! They came up with a plan where you hardwire a high amperage timer onto the compressor and add "heat tape" to the fins of the air conditioner to keep it from freezing up. I excitedly did it!

It was way better than nothing, and we were grateful for it. But it's just not "great". You can't set the temperature (it's just a timer based system), so you guess based on ambient temperature. It gets colder, but not as much as you'd like. High-amp timers are surprisingly expensive, and you have to be okay with getting deep into the guts of a your a/c in a way that will not cause a fire while you sleep! No matter how good a job you do, you are dramatically voiding the warranty (5 years on new Energy Star Air conditioners!)

The worst part is that since it's not a "smart" system, changes in the amount of food being stored, door openings, outside temperature/humidity could cause the front fins to freeze into a solid block of ice while we slept! The next morning we'd walk into a warm cooler with smelly yellow broccoli. Depressing, and expensive in terms of lost sales.

We fiddled with the USDA system for 2 seasons. I loved thinking about the money we were saving on a "real" cooler (on the days it worked well) and I especially loved hearing our friends complain about cost/slow response time from their compressor repairmen! *I* was in control! But Kathryn, representing the more practical side of the family, wasn't so impressed with my control.

We couldn't get it as cold as we should, so the "fresh" veggies we were giving out looked older than the grocery store produce from California. And it was dependent on outside-temperatures, so, the hotter it was outside, the worse looking our produce was. PLUS we had multiple (infrequent but very expensive) complete overnight freeze-up failures each season which meant lost revenue and lost-time picking through gross produce. By the end of the second year it was clear that our losses were greater than the cost of a "real" walk-in cooler.