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| The Two Sweeties on a quest |
This is it! We have had enough, enough, enough of problems with our built in cold plate refrigeration system on ORION. It was slowly driving us insane...when connected to shore power at the marina the units worked just fine, but ever since moving off the dock we have had intermittent problems trying to keep temperatures in the lower levels! Having had to run the Diesel engine sometimes for as much as a few hours in order to keep things cold because the wind and solar could not keep up with the power drainage...we finally decided that..yes...enough is enough! We (again) researched boat refrigeration on the net for alternative solutions and decided on a portable compressor driven unit that would work both with a 12 V system and a 110 V system. West Marine in Fajardo looked promising for the purchase of such a unit.
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| Ferry ride from Culebra to Fajardo |
So this morning...the morning of my birthday...my sweetie and I took the ferry from Culebra to Fajardo...and so our quest began. There are several portable compressor driven refrigeration/freezer units for RVs and boats on the market. Our two finalists were ENGEL and DOMETIC...both extremely reliable companies with reliable products! We ended up going with DOMETIC, because that's what West Marine had available to take home with us...and we wanted it NOW...we NEEDED IT NOW...our sanity was at stake!
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| Our new refrigerator...on top are water jugs... |
Here is the unit we bought...a 52 quart Dometic compressor driven refrigerator/freezer, which works either with 12 V battery power or 110 V power. The unit can be used either as a freezer or as a fridge...we will use it as a designated fridge. We ordered a 24 quart unit also, which we will run as a designated freezer. These units are compressor driven just like a normal fridge, but they make hardly any noise and use hardly any power. They are not cheap, but they are the solution to our problems :) And they are excellent for combining with solar and wind energy!
We took the unit home with us, which is an entirely different story by itself...suffice it to say that we made it back onto the ferry, and with the kind help of a local publico (public transportation car) driver to our dinghy, and with determination back onto ORION :)
The new fridge is already running like a charm! We plugged it in, adjusted the settings, filled it with the food stuff from the now demoted cold plate system and within one hour it had reached the set temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, using only 7 Amps! Best of all...it is so quiet that we had to check and re-assure ourselves several times that the unit was in fact running...WOW! We are very happy so far...will give it a few days to find out how things will progress...don't want to jinx it, but hope that this will be it my friends...
For now we got our sanity back...I am happy and so is my sweetie :) Living on a boat has its challenges...we hope that the refrigeration challenge will no longer be a challenge...as usual please stay tuned as we adjust to being on the sea full time. We are in beautiful Culebra still and will start sailing to nearby little islands soon...we love to explore and we love to share it with you through this blog...God bless!
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| happy |
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| happy |
