Of love and refrigerant
RIP big fridge
A few months back something truly sad happened. After 13 years of loyal service, the mega boat fridge Paddy built – the one that made it all the way round the South Pacific, helping out cruisers with less functioning fridges and housing the 50kg Tuna of Terror – cooled its last cold thing.
Since we were no longer living aboard, it took a while before we actually noticed it. It wasn’t until I stayed over on Wildflower to make it easier to catch an early morning flight that I made the discovery. First the lack of noise tipped me off – the fridge’s comforting buzzing and whirring was part of the boat’s soundtrack – then it was the smell.
While we didn’t have much food in there, it was enough to make it smell like something had died and was in the process of quietly decomposing. So I did what sensible adult would do, I slammed the lid shut and hoped the problem would go away.
It didn’t.
The cleanup
On getting home and finding the problem hadn’t fixed itself, there was nothing for it. We picked a weekend, gathered all the cleaning products known to mankind and set to. The smell was horrific. We grabbed black rubbish bags and threw the freezer’s contents in them without pausing to identify what anything used to be (the former bait was fairly easy to work out though.)
Once the offending former-frozens were jettisoned (stuffing black bags into the marina rubbish bins while stifling gagging noises when fellow yachties walked past) we scrubbed the living daylights out of the fridge and freezer cabinets.
Being a chest freezer this necessitated extended periods of time hanging headfirst over the edge of the cabinet, holding my breath while the blood rushed to my head. I am pleased to say though that this and a combination of cleaning products, bleach, vanilla essence and airing the thing out, means Wildflower is now blessedly stink-free.
A new obsession
Wildflower’s lack of refrigeration left Paddy with a couple of choices. He could buy a new fridge or he could build the Mother of All Fridges. I’m pretty sure you can guess which option he went with. Building Fridgezilla is actually something Paddy had been talking about for a while when the old fridge was starting to reach the end of its life.
And so the research began. I would come home to find Paddy mesmerised by YouTube videos on how to build a boat fridge. So many YouTube videos… I had no idea so many people were so passionate about refrigeration – and that so many of them had YouTube channels.
A couple of top examples for the geeks:
AC Service Tech LLC (YouTube channel)
Note: Paddy says most of the stuff on YouTube is biased towards air-conditioning but the principals are the same for freezers and refrigeration.
I joke about it but it’s actually pretty cool that people are so generous with their time and prepared to share information that otherwise giant nerds like Paddy you wouldn’t know.
Goodbye kitchen table
It started off with a few packages arriving at the back door with the odd switch or coil in them
Then our kitchen table turned into a steampunk nightmare of copper piping, wire and dials. Every day a new package arrived and the mountain grew bigger. A hermetic compressor, suction line accumulator, sub cooler, liquid refrigerant receiver, a water cooled and air cooled condenser appeared, along with lots of copper pipe and fittings, various valves and (after some negotiating) a big orange bottle of refrigerant.
Note for nerds: Paddy says he was going to put the whole thing on a basal platen made of prefabulated amulite, but when he discovered that didn’t exist he used aluminum, which he got from his mate Gregor’s workshop
I am also learning a lot of things about fridges.
For example I know Wildflower’s new fridge will use British thermal units, which Paddy tells me are the best kind of thermal units you can get.
“BTUs have always been better than kilowatts. If you don’t believe me just go on Google and see how many BTUs there are in a kilowatt. There’s more, so it must be better” – So sayeth Paddy.
A mysterious love note
Things got even more fascinating one weekend when Paddy was away for work and I spotted a hand written note on the coffee table in our living room.
‘That’s nice,’ I thought. ‘Paddy’s left me a note. I wonder what it says?’
I picked it up and quickly realised Paddy hadn’t written it. In a woman’s handwriting was the very un-Paddylike sentence ‘I love you, you handsome (something a little tricky to make out) wonder’.
I was, understandably, a little surprised.
Examining the note more closely I discovered it was not exactly a new one, and apparently not from New Zealand. It was written on the back of a deposit slip from the Camden National Bank in Maine USA and the empty date section started 19– , so definitely not written recently!
So what was it? Where did it come from? Was it a memento from a past love? Did a time-traveler from the US have a crush on one or the other of us?
When Paddy got back I handed it to him and said ‘sweetie, do you know what this is?’ It turns out he was just as puzzled as I was. When I told him where I found it he had a eureka moment and burst out laughing, then fished out a retro looking book.
He had bought a second hand copy of Refrigeration for Pleasureboats by Nigel Calder online and when he opened the package a piece of paper that had been used as a bookmark fell out. He didn’t think much of it and put it on the coffee table. Mystery solved.
Help us find the handsome wonder
Except the mystery isn’t solved, not really. Who is the handsome wonder? Did he ever get his note? Was it a secret admirer? Unrequited fridge-building love? Did he and the note-writer live happily ever after? We need to know!
My workmate Liz helped with one piece of the puzzle – the two words in the note I couldn’t quite make out.
I love you, you handsome ‘car heart-clad? car hat Dad?’ wonder.
I was puzzling those two words out loud in the office when she said ‘I know, it’s Carhartt!
It turns out Carhartt is a US brand of work wear (Liz was gifted a pair of Carhartt overalls and says they are brilliant).
So we now know the full text of the note reads: I love you, you handsome Carhartt-clad wonder. Which in the context makes a lot of sense!
As for the rest of the mystery, if anyone can help us, we would love to hear from you.
Our clues so far are:
A second hand copy of Refrigeration for Pleasureboats bought on Amazon.
Richmond – written on the side of the book in vivid. It could be a surname, it could be a place, it could be the name of a boat.
A deposit slip from Camden National Bank in Maine.
If any of this rings a bell to you, leave a comment or email whichwayisstarboardagain@gmail.com
It’s alive (kind of)!
After migrating from the kitchen to the lounge the parts made it to the garage and formed the shape of a fridge (or at least a condensing unit – which Paddy tells me is all the smarts of a fridge). It makes all the whizzing and whirring motions a fridge should make and passed its tests with flying colours.
For the fridge nerds: Fridgezilla was pressure tested with inert gas to 300 PSI (pounds per square inch of pressure) – 50 PSI more than it is going to use when it’s running – to make sure there weren’t any leaks. He found a couple and fixed them. Then it was vacuum tested to suck out all the moisture and it vacuum tested down to 200 microns.
Even more for the fridge nerds
If you know the lingo, are building a fridge or are just really interested in enginerding, then here’s a five minute video explanation of the condensing unit of the Mega Fridge.
Stay tuned for when Fridgezilla is on board and cooling its first ice cream!
