When the lights go out: mains, ice-lined or solar?
Three ways to keep a fridge cold through unreliable power, and a quick picker to find your starting point.
Power cuts do not announce themselves. A fridge that performs beautifully on a good week can be a liability in a bad one. Choosing how your fridge is powered is really choosing how it fails.
Three families of fridges
Mains with ice lining. Ice-lined refrigerators run on mains power, but water or phase-change coolant packs line the walls, which gives long holdover. Kenya's programme reports a minimum of 20 hours and often more than two days.1 Holdover here means the hours the fridge stays below 10°C after the power stops.1
Solar direct-drive. These connect straight to solar panels and need no battery, which removes a common failure point. Maintenance can be as simple as wiping dust from the panels.2
Standard mains units. Fine where the grid is steady, ideally with voltage protection. Gavi's equipment guide treats voltage stabilisers as their own category, and Kenya's best models include protection against volatile supply.31
Try the power picker
Where the advice comes from
Gavi's technology guide, as summarised in a technical network discussion, recommends solar for sites with fewer than eight hours of electricity a day or outages longer than 48 hours. For four to seven hours of supply it points to ice-lined refrigerators rated for four hours a day, or solar.4 The picker follows that logic. It is written for immunisation programmes, so private clinics and pharmacies should treat the result as a starting point, not a verdict.
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- SEforALL and CHAI. Chilling Prospects 2022: Expanding the vaccine cold chain in Kenya through innovative cooling solutions. www.seforall.org ↗
- Chimbi J. No power? No problem: for rural Kenyan vaccinators, a solar fridge is a ray of sunshine. Gavi VaccinesWork, 26 May 2026. www.gavi.org ↗
- Gavi. Product information: vaccines and cold chain equipment (updated 12 February 2026). www.gavi.org ↗
- TechNet-21 discussion. When to consider solar based on hours of mains/generator electricity available each day. technet-21.org ↗
