Refrigeration on the Cheap

I lived on the boat for about 6 months without refrigeration. I rotated gallon-size jugs of water from Ardea's built-in icebox to the freezers at my office and the apartment of my brother, Charlie. Even though Chuck loved my random visits to his freezer, where my ice blocks occupied about half the space, it got pretty old after a while. That said, a marine refrigeration unit to convert the icebox was gonna run me near a thousand bucks. I found a cheaper way to do it with the help of some of the many sailboat geniuses at Berkeley Marina (Sean, you saved me a lot of cussing on this one).

The Plan:
                  Dismantle a mini-fridge and install the compressor and cold plate into my boat.

The Cost:
                 $40 for the fridge (craigslist)
                 $10 for some plexiglass
                 $5 for tools/hardware dropped into the bilge, where stainless steel goes to die
                 And  about 12 hours of labor

The Result:

                So far so good. Keeps the fridge at about 35 degrees. Of course, it hasn't been subject to months on end of pounding through waves, and it is almost certain it will fail before an $800 unit would. But, I can replace the compressor unit rather easily at this point. Call it a victory.

Below are photos with captions describing what I did.





The donor fridge who so graciously offered its guts to cool my beer.



I first removed screws and metal panels to expose insulation. I had no idea what was buried in there and I didn't want to break anything so I slowly removed insulation. I could have saved a lot of time in this step...





The copper heat-sink wire runs along the roof and sides of the mini-fridge. It ended up being fairly easy to dismantle the whole thing by pulling the metal shell off of the outside of the fridge. The heat-sink wire could then be pulled off of the outer portion of the insulation. Pulling insulation out from the inside was a slow, messy approach.




Re-shaping the heat sink around a fire extinguisher.



I built a shelf for the compressor out of some scrap wood I found in the dumpster of infinite possibilities.





I then (slowly) used a jigsaw to cut a hole in the stainless steel ice box. I cut out a larger area than I ended up needing. Would have liked to undo that one, but so it goes.

Cold plate fed into icebox. The compressor shelf now sits beneath the port lazarette storage.

In place. Notice the aesthetically pleasing arrangement of the screws in the shelf.



I repaired the ice box by taping the cut-out pieces back with foil tape and filling from the other side with expanding adhesive foam, which was remarkably effective at holding everything in place while providing some insulation, though messy to work with. I put too much foam in on the first go-around- it expanded a bit more than I expected.



Eventually I cut away all that extra foam and re-did the job so that it looks a lot cleaner, though the whole area is covered by plywood that makes up the floor of my lazarette storage, so it doesn't matter too much.



View into upper deck of ice-box, where a plexi-glass housing for the cold plate and booze are kept.

The plexi-glass box for the cold plate also helps direct the cool air from the smaller upper portion of my ice-box to the larger compartment. That was a pretty simple process using plex-glass from the hardware store. It has to be cut using great patience or it will crack, but otherwise, plexi-glass is easy to work with.