When I brought Near & Farr I knew I would have to do something about refrigeration, she has a fairly standard freezer / fridge setup which runs of an engine driven compressor.
Think combination chilly bin and fridge at home -basically two stainless steel boxes with brine filled walls that is cooled by the compressor when turned on while the engine is running. The larger is the freezer and the fridge is the smaller box which is cooled through the “back” of the freezer. This is extremely efficient as I found out, but it is really hard to gauge how long to leave the freezer turned on or how cold it is getting, frozen ginger beer bottles will break. It’s a great system when you’re out on the water as it’s easy to cool the freezer down while you’re running the engine either motoring or to recharge the batteries which you do daily. Friends use block of polystyrene on top of the food to keep the cold in and separate the “needs to be really frozen” from the” keep it cold” foods.
I decided that I don’t want to have to run engines every day while I’m on the marina just so that I can keep food on board so have had an Isotherm plate and compressor installed and run the whole thing as a fridge (no ice cream kept on board)…
It’s a DIY kit but as there was drilling through the existing brine filled box walls I decided that I’d pay someone to do it. Sean from Fridgetech did a great job, he came and measured the freezer box to work out which unit to fit then it didn’t take him long to drill the hole, fit the plate, install the second compressor and cut a couple of vent holes. Looked easy but he did know what he was doing – would I do it myself next time? definitely if I didn’t have to worry about ruining an existing freezer. The clever bits he did – put a rubber mat over the plate so that it doesn’t get damaged / food stuck to it and insulate the pipe between the fridge and the compressor. I also got him to put in a temperature probe so that I can monitor how well it is working.
It’s a long hot summer, it hasn’t rained for the whole month and the last few days the temperatures have been in the high 20’s… even hotter on the boat, it’s 26 at the moment and that feels cool the fridge is sitting at 6 deg, measured at the top of the box so it’s at least a couple of degrees cooler, not ideal (2-4 deg is recommended) but I’m learning where to put things to maximise coldness. The drinks go in the bottom, which is mostly a shape thing, then everything else is in solid bottomed plastic containers, separated by type (meat in one veggies another), on top of that with milk and anything else that needs to be coldest leaning on the plate. Things that I want to keep out of the heat go in the existing fridge part of the box so that’s things like eggs, peanut butter and bread that at home I’d be keeping cool in the pantry.
So far it’s working and it will be interesting to see if when the weather cools down if the fridge is able to get colder too, if not I may change to a “colder” compressor but will wait and see, there’s always the option of turning on the other compressor while I’m running the engine, which I do once a week as an “engine maintenance” thing anyway and getting it colder that way.
landtoseanz 