Refrigerators and Nutcases
Saturday 30th January 2021
Recently we’ve been finding it challenging to keep the food in our freezer frozen. There could be a number of reasons, first and foremost is that’s it’s a lot warmer here in southern Florida in January than it was heading down the east coast in the autumn. It could also be that we don’t have much food in there at the minute so there’s a lot of dead space. Our refrigeration system relies on a compressor that runs directly on a belt off the engine. Then the refrigerant is circulated through two aluminum cooling plates, filled with a liquid that freezes down at sub-zero temperatures and these plates then cool the freezer compartment. The problem with a direct drive system is that we end up still needing to run the engine twice a day even though we are on a dock with mains electricity and we probably haven’t been running it as long as it really needs. In the future we may upgrade to a system that has both direct drive and electric driven cooling. The only other issue that we can think of is that the refrigerant in the system is running low. We do know that we tend to lose the coolant over the winter in New England but we presumed this was due to the extreme cold and the junctions in the piping not sealing so well. In any event we purchased a small refill bottle of R-134a coolant (relatively low ozone depletion potential) and added it to the system. Hopefully that will help.
Having completed this job we were just about to set out for a walk when a gentleman on the dock started chatting to us about the marina. He told us he was planning to buy a boat up in Fort Myers and he seemed normal enough … that is until he looked up to the sky, pointed to the vapor trails from a passing jet and told us he wanted to get away from the chemicals that are being dropped on us from these “chem-trails”. I said I thought these jet trails were mostly just condensation but he insisted it was much more than that and tried to give us a business card, which I declined. We departed and Gloria, being the nice person she is, suggested that he was perhaps referring to insect (mosquito) spraying. However, a little later we saw his car, painted out with bright signs about “chem-trails” and how we are being “implanted”. I think I was right … a complete nut job. Glad I didn’t mention that Gloria and I were chemists or that I’d just been pumping R-134a into our refrigerator!
Mike
24 42.220 N, 81 06.131 W
No comments:
Post a Comment