Designing and Implementing Field Testing for Off- and Weak-Grid Refrigerators
Practical guidance on monitoring refrigerator performance and efficiency in the field.
Efficiency for Access is developing resources to help practitioners design and implement field testing projects. The resources focus on performance monitoring and measurement of appliances and equipment designed for use in off-grid weak-grid contexts.
Successful field testing provides information about a product’s performance, the user experience and its impacts on their livelihoods. In addition, the data and intelligence gathered from field testing inform decisions about design, financing, business models and more.
The guide provides specific design and implementation considerations for refrigerators, including templates for data collection, recommendations for defining and measuring technical parameters and other customisable resources. We drew the learnings and examples from our team’s experience conducting refrigerator field testing in Uganda, Rwanda and India and from industry experts through the Efficiency for Access Off-Grid Refrigerator Technical Working Group.
This document complements an appliance agnostic field-testing guide published in January 2022, entitled Practical Guidance for Designing and Implementing Field Testing for Appliances & Productive Use Equipment. We recommend that this refrigerator field testing guide is read together with the appliance agnostic guide for a holistic view. Guidance on field testing of solar water pumps is also available here.