Re: DC refrigeration
Hi Linda, We recently had the old DC refrig system removed from our 1987 P42, and had it replaced with Frigoboat system. This is a keel-cooled system, no holding plates. Our research tells us that a keel-cooled system is most useful for local & coastal cruising, not for world voyaging. We've just completed a 5-week cruise, and the Frigoboat worked better than expected in most respects. The amp draw is pretty low (for a reefer system!), and the compressor ran very seldom, so the amp draw was intermittent, not continuous. Our wind generator and solar panels kept up with our energy consumption pretty well, and we only had to run the engine once during a four-day period of anchoring for the sole purpose of charging the batteries. There was one bug, but it worked in our favor and we are currently figuring out how to tweak the system to fix it. The reefer & freezer each have a thermostat and a bit of small copper tubing in them. When anything was touching either the thermostat or the tubing, it would fool the thermostat and the box would get colder and colder ... but mysteriously without running the compressor. So it did not affect our energy consumption, but did freeze our lettuce! I think it's one of those things that will fix itself if you can tweak it. It only happened once to the fridge and twice to the freezer. As to cost, I seem to recall the Frigoboat system itself cost nearly $3k. Removal of the old system was an additional cost; if we'd had more time we could have removed the old system ourselves. (It wasn't rocket science.) You'd want to get an estimate for everything. Hope this helps.
