Havin’ Trouble Keeping My Cool

Sunday

I’ve been off the boat for a couple of days and got back yesterday afternoon. I took off Wednesday, had dinner with daughter Suzanne in Davis and then went on up to Placerville. Judy and I had a delightful couple of days together. I hit the Placerville library book sale on Saturday and came back with some cookbooks and a couple of books on sailing. I need some lessons in sail trim – the art and science of setting the sails to make the boat move as fast as possible.

I have to confess that after the wonderful days together I especially missed Judy when I got back to the boat. It made me wonder why I was in any hurry to get back. I am running short of things I can fix up on the boat without spending money. Ah well – press on!

I’ve been having trouble keeping my cool. As I mentioned before, the refrigerator doesn’t work right. It wasn’t so much of a problem when I first moved aboard. It was cooler and I wasn’t trying to keep any perishable items. That is changing. I want to expand my culinary adventures a bit. Rice and soup get old – fast. I’ve been buying a few fresh veggies, eggs, and a few other things that do better when kept cool. The weather is not cooperating with my desires. It has been unseasonably warm and sunny. The boat actually gets a bit stuffy if I don’t open it up during the day. When I came back to the boat yesterday, the boat was warm enough that the icebox/refrigerator was also getting warm.

Faithful readers will remember that when I bought the boat, I noticed that the refrigerator wasn’t working. The previous owner swore that it worked – the condenser on the inside of the refrigerator had frost on the after he turned it on. (The condenser is that white thing that wraps around inside the refrigerator on the back side and the right side. It is the part that actually does the cooling.) After some negotiation, the owner agreed to drop the price by a couple hundred dollars to allow for repairs.

As I mentioned a few days back, I turned the refrigerator off until I could get the repair guy out here to look at it. I turned it back on a few hours before he came to look at it and of course it was working just fine when he got here. I left it running after he left and by morning it had quit cooling again. The compressor motor runs full time but the condenser is not at all cool. The only way I can get the motor to stop is to go out to the cockpit, open up a locker and pull a fuse.

In the picture to the left, the cockpit locker is under that open lid in the cockpit seat to the right of the wheel.

By the way, the refrigerator compressor lives in this locker too. In household refrigerators, the compressor is that little motor that purrs away at the bottom of your refrigerator. On a small boat like Laelia, it is a good idea to keep it out of the living area because it is noisy and it takes up room. On Laelia it lives on a shelf in that same cockpit locker, tucked way up high and well back from the locker lid so it will stay dry.

Here’s what it looks like.

The refrigerator itself looks more like an icebox. It is under the counter on the right in this picture. Access is by opening the doors in the top of the counter.

It isn’t very big. Notice how much of the room is taken up by the egg carton in the picture to the right.

Sailboat refrigerators normally open from the top like this because it helps to keep the cool air in the refrigerator. Remember that cold air is heavier than warm air. With a side opening refrigerator like we have in houses, the cold air pours out in an avalanche every time we open the door. Since we need to conserve power on a boat, we open from the top and most of the cold air stays put.

Inquiring minds will want to know why I want to turn the refrigerator off and on. Well, it’s like this…

At the moment, the boat is in a slip with a connection to normal household electricity. Boat people refer to this arrangement as being connected to shore power. While I am on shore power I have a battery charger that keeps the batteries up to full charge. I need this because the refrigerator runs off of the boat’s batteries and it draws a lot of current. If I have no shore power, the batteries would go flat before long.

When I head offshore for a few days or more, the refrigerator might easily drain the battery to the point that I couldn’t start the diesel engine to recharge the batteries. That would be a double bummer since it is really nice to have the engine when maneuvering around the dock at the end of the trip. What I would like to be able to do is turn on the refrigerator when I know the batteries are in good shape and turn it off once the refrigerator interior is well cooled. When I am sailing the batteries will be charged either by running the engine or (someday) by solar panels.

That leads to today’s project – fix the wiring. It seems like no project of any size can get under way without having to empty one or both of the cockpit lockers. This project was no exception. All that stuff you can see in the picture (and more) had to be removed. Then I had to figure out the wiring. Remember - the boat is 33 years old and has been through three previous owners. Each of these owners has had equipment installed or removed. Each operation requires some wiring or leaves behind some wiring that is no longer of any use. One might think that unused wiring would be removed along with the device that it supported but this is not the case. Some owners do their own work and they are lazy. Others have it done by workers who are being paid $70 to $120 per hour. The owner wants the work done quickly! Either way, unused wiring is left in place. Sorting out what is in use and removing the unused portions took most of the time on this job.

The investigation turned up the interesting fact that the refrigerator motor was wired directly to the boat battery switch. The only way to turn it off (other than the fuse) was to turn off all DC power to the rest of the boat. Since almost everything runs off DC, this is not a good situation.

After several hours work, I had the wiring rearranged to my satisfaction. The refrigerator runs off shore power when it is hooked up and the circuit breaker is turned on for the AC/DC converter. If I turn off the AC circuit breaker or disconnect shore power, the refrigerator continues to run off the battery until I turn it off at the DC circuit breaker panel. The black rectangle above and to the left of the companionway ladder is the DC panel – much more convenient to use than pulling a fuse in a holder buried in the cockpit locker.

Yet another step toward being ready to head offshore to exotic locations!

The only other activity of note today was ripping CDs to my laptop so I can have music when I am out of reach of radio stations. CD players don’t last too well in the marine environment – too much moisture with a high salt content. The best thing to do is get my CDs onto the iPhone and play them from there.

Tomorrow I hope to get out and do some sailing. The wind is supposed to be about 10 knots coming from the south. That should make for a pleasant day’s sail. Tuesday is supposed to be even windier. If it isn’t too bad, I may try to get out two days in a row.