We sell over a hundred varieties of apples. Every week we have new varieties of apples ripening. We usually start out with Quinte in mid-July then Melba a week later and go on from there until late October and early November with Fuji, Granny Smith, Rome, Braeburn etc. It is hot here in July, August and often the first half of September and apples get soft fast. In previous years, we have struggled to find a way to keep them stored so that the warm summer weather would not cause them to lose their crispness. But we never really came up with a good way to store them; even storing them in shade and a basement caused them to deteriorate way too fast.

Last summer, my husband came up with the idea of converting an area of our storage building (where we usually store supplies and such) into a walk in cooler. His one problem was developing a way to control the temperature so that we could keep the apples at the right temperature to keep them juicy and crisp. The problem with using a room A/C was (1) The A/C’s thermostat would only go down to 62–this was no problem for my hubby, the real problem was that if you set it below 50F and it was humid the thing would ice up. Well, with his design it sensed the ice and it shut off the compressor until the ice melted! One smart gizmo! He developed a way to modify a everyday room air conditioner in order to allow it to keep the apples at a much colder temperature than the outside air. He called the controller, which uses a Picaxe Microcontroller (a tiny on-board computer) The Smart Room A/C Contoller. He was so thrilled with the design he wrote an article for a widely read Electronics magazine Nuts and Volts. The article was printed in the October 2008 issue.

If you might be interested in making one yourself, go to Magicland Electronics for more help.

The room was built using 1-1/2″ insulating foam panels for the walls. This part of the project was designed and built by my boy, Matthew. We used it last summer and it worked quite well. We then stored our left-over apples in it when we closed up last December and they look the same right now as when we put them in there–most types are still fairly crisp.

So now we can keep our summer apples during the hot weather without fear of deterioration and, over the winter, we can store apples for sale in the spring.