Now that the test server has a full copy from master, how could I just do a incremental refreshing once a month?
Instead copying all the DB (1.7GB), just copy what has been changed?
Is that possible?
You cannot accomplish incremental updates if your choice of tool is pg_dump. The only way to do a true incremental would be to rely upon something like rsync on the data directory while the master server is offline.
So, assuming that is not an option, you should probably look at the various true replication solutions that are available and see which of those might serve as an alternative.