wrote in news:1170898987.617665.77550
@q2g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
I'm building a 26 foot pilothouse sloop and the plans call for a large
icebox. My experience doing the kind of cruising I expect to do on
this boat is that finding ice consumes a lot of time, it doesn't last
long, it takes up a lot of space, and the food items can get soggy if
I am doing any hard sailing. I have noticed that Fisheries Supply in
Seattle sells "conversion kits" for converting ice boxes to 12 VDC
refrigerator. This seems like a sensible choice, and might even be
good to build in right from the start. Does anyone have experience
with these kits or any kind of application other than a drop in box?
I am thinking that with 4" polyurethane foam that I'll be able to
handle the power consumption with a pair of Grp 31 batteries. Does
this seem reasonable?
Al Gunther Kingston, WA ---- 47° 48.1'N, 122° 30.0'W
http://homepage.mac.com/agunther/.Public/index.html
http://www.onlinemarine.com/cgi-
local/SoftCart.exe/online_superstore/galley/cold_machine.htm?E+scstore
We had an Adler-Barbour cold plate (12VDC-115VAC) aboard an Endeavour 35
sloop. It ran off 4 golf cart batteries in the lazerette right under the
compressor-condenser unit. It kept the beer cold, sometimes frozen.
Plan on about 50-60AH/day. It ran about 50% of the time on 5A. It
doesn't have a lot of "cooling capacity" so don't expect it to be like an
ice cream machine in the icebox. You CAN make a small quantity of ice in
its evaporator, which has a vertical hole about the same size as is in a
little 2 cuft bar fridge at home. If you make ice in it, or load up the
fridge just before you leave port on batteries....it'll run continuously
for a couple of DAYS to cool all that heat load down to the thermostat
shutoff. A good trick is to put frozen food you're soon going to eat
into the freezer to "help" the A-B suck out the heat as it melts. Load
it with COLD beer and it will very cheaply keep the beer cold.
There are a couple of downsides to this utopia, however......
The worst of it was the damned thing generated this nauseatingly
repetitive pulsing noise DEAD ON MARINE CHANNEL 16 the whole time it was
on, not necessarily compressing. It radiated on Channel 16 to every VHF
radio....bzzt....bzzt.....bzzt.bzzt.bzzt over and over to drive you
crazy. The signal from it was too strong to squelch out. No other
channel, like one you never use, had a peep on it....dammit. Attempts to
shield the unit were unsuccessful. It has to have airflow for the
condenser to heat up the lazerette it's mounted in. That's not bad,
either, because the heat it generates DRYS THINGS in the lazerette..
The other problem, of course, is frosting up. The lid on a boat ice box
is usually made to look pretty....NOT hermetically seal the box against
any air leaks. Ours was wood and attempts to add rubber seals to it were
only partially successful. Air going into the icebox and any water
inside the box from the stuff generates an amazing coating of ice inside
and outside of the little evaporator the freon is boiling away in. So,
you do a lot of manual defrosting. "Hey, it's an icebox with a drain in
it so that should be easy, right? Wrong! If you just shut the unit down
and let it drain into the icebox drain, it will drain on all the stuff
UNDER it making all the food WET as it defrosts. So, the ONLY way to
defrost is to move all the food from the icebox into the sink during the
defrosting process. The unit needs to be mounted near the TOP of the
icebox to cool the WHOLE icebox. It only cools the box from the top of
the unit to the bottom of the icebox. If you mount it in the bottom of
the icebox, where it would easily defrost, the top of the icebox has NO
COOLING....same reason the little bar fridge's evaporator is in the TOP
of the little bar fridge. The more the lid seal leaks and the more often
you open the icebox for beer, the more often you get to unload it to
defrost it. I never seemed to make any difference, whatsoever, if you
let it go for months with this big block of rime ice hiding the actual
evaporator, except you couldn't get the ice trays into it any more
because the INSIDE became solid ice....my captain's solution...ignore
it...(c;
You'll also find the top-mounted evaporator IN THE WAY getting into the
top-loading/unloading icebox. The stuff you want is ALWAYS buried in the
other stuff directly UNDER the evaporator you're contorting to get under.
Remember DO NOT MOUNT IT LOW...mount it as high as you can get. They
come precharged with Freon and have fittings that break internal seals as
you assemble them so you don't need to hire an HVAC engineer to install
them. Use a spray bottle full of soapy water to spot freon leaks on all
fittings, INCLUDING the ones the factory put together....
Larry
--
Democracy is when two wolves and a sheep vote on who's for dinner.
Liberty is when the sheep has his own gun.