Louisiana is HOT in the summer. When the days get up to 104-105 degrees a few days in a row, our two 16K BTU air conditioners just have a tough time keeping up. We decided that it may be best to just make sure that they are topped off with Freon.
I am heading out of town on business so we decided to hire someone to come add some freon and see if that may help out the A/C units a bit. Since we will have someone here, we decided to have them check out the small refrigerator/freezer that Deb and I have always called The “Stove Fridge”. It looks like someone removed the gimbaled stove and oven from this boat and replaced it with this refrigerator.
A few months after we bought the boat, the unit started to rattle when running and eventually stopped getting cold. We didn’t fix it, because we knew we would be tossing it one day and putting a stove/oven back in there. Funny how plans change.
Here is how it happened for us. We decided to defrost our freezer and when we did, some of the fresh Salmon we froze was not completely frozen and we could see a bit of “juice” in the package. This led to the conclusion that we needed to do something about the Freezer too. The long term fix for this is to install all new Technautics Cool Blue cold plate DC units, but we were going to wait and make the purchase in conjunction with a boat show to get the better deal given we are going to drop $5-6K for the units.
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| The opening after removing the built in (Notice the permanent one built into the cabinet to the right) |
The short term solution was to see if we can get the refrigeration/Air Conditioning guy to see about checking the built in unit as well. So I pulled all of the wooden trim off and removed it from the cabinets it was built in to.
Much to my pleasant surprise, I noticed that there was a set of 12V DC fuses on this unit and what appeared to be both an AC and DC power supply. YippeeKayAye !! I connected it up to a small battery jumper unit and sure enough the compressor kicked on and so did the light inside. So this unit that I had intended to toss in the trash and put in a stove, turns out to be a pretty decent Norcold AC/DC built in unit (even with a decorative wooden face).
So as I head out of town in the morning, I bestow upon my lovely bride and admiral 2 Air
Conditioners that hopefully will work a tad better after additional freon and a decent AC/DC unit that likely needs a charge or a compressor.
Right now the Galley is a mess with this unit pulled out sitting in the middle of the floor. You can see to the right, that I had to take the door off the front so that I could get some leverage to remove it from that opening. It was such a tight fit, I had to wiggle it back and forth about a 1/4″ at a time to slide it forward. Now sitting on a mat to keep it from scratching the parquet floor, it seems to take up a very large amount of space inside the galley. I am hopeful the cooling guy has a way to charge this unit (there are not freon service ports) because at $1100 for this unit, I don’t want to now have to toss it. I was actually thrilled at the 12volt power option.
So I will be waiting with baited breath for the call from my bride telling me the cost and hopefully telling me she needed a blanket in the afternoon because of how good the units are cooling the boat down.