A few days in Red Hook on St. Thomas, and we’re good to go with the freezer, and the refrigerator problems are at least…better understood.
It’s not really possible to say enough great things about the people at Reefco in St. Thomas that got us sorted. The technician they sent was another liveaboard cruiser they gets it about how we want to prioritize and solve things, and she was technically savvy and sorted us out in short order for a lot less money than we were dreading. And she was more than willing to listen to me prattle on with all I’d observed and diagnosed about the system and took all I said into account when she was doing her own testing. As opposed to the last guy we called when the freezer failed the first time. He showed up when I was off the boat, flipped the breaker (that I turned off, since it was running and not making cold) and told Kathy that it wasn’t working because the breaker was off and left her a bill – this I do NOT need. What was apparently happening is that a internal valve was intermittently seizing up, and we’re guessing the subsequent hot running exacerbated the situation by making the metal swell up a bit. When the pump was shut down and reached ambient temperature it came right up and started working again – which is the exact same behavior that we saw down here. But that valve was due to fail for good at some point and the whole system was unreliable.
The other day I posted a picture of what I believed to be a compressor. There WAS a compressor in that picture, but there were also a bunch off additional hoses, pipes, coolers, heat sinks, and a computer attached to the “compressor”. If one were to order the “compressor” on line it would come with all that stuff and cost well over $1,200. However the actual “compressor” pump is the central black thing I’ve highlighted in this photo here. Apparently you can pull all that external stuff off, screw in a new compressor pump and off you go for a fraction of the cost.
What I appreciate is that our tech easily could have sold me the whole new unit, I wouldn’t have been the wiser which is why I’m not doing this professionally. I can get my head around the basics of how the system works but there is still a lot of detail I don’t know, like which part of the “Compressor” is really broken and how not to replace what works just fine.
All in all, we were thrilled to get away with this repair for far less than we feared it would cost us, including some diagnostics to sort the refrigeration a bit more. There is still some electrical weirdness, but I know where to look. And the slow leak in the refrigerant was also isolated. Unfortunately it is in the evaporator plate which is one of those parts where the labor to replace it will cost more than the plate does. In the mean time it is a slow leak, so we can live with topping off the refrigerant every couple of months.
We passed a quiet New Year’s Eve in Red Hook with the kids, took a safari bus ride ($1 per person vs. $10 per person for a cab!) to see The Hobbit, and still made the best of being not quite where we wanted to be for a few days.
