Recreational Refrigeration

I've never been fond of the little 12/120 volt refrigerators found in RV's and boats...they maybe work OK on 120 but when they get switched to 12vdc they eat batteries. We had one, a Norcold, on a sailboat in the Caribbean. We kept our drinks in it and we pretended the drinks were cold when we took them out of the fridge, but we all knew the difference in temp was only 5° or so and if we wanted them any colder we'd have to run some kind of motor. I called it "The Nearcold".

We have one of these little refrigerators on Big Duck and it does work on 120, even makes ice - not bad for a 40 year old unit. But I don't trust it to leave enough juice in my house battery to light my way to the head at night, not to mention that running a battery dead is the quickest way to shorten it's life. I considered one of those fancy $1,000 units that can be set to be either a refrigerator or freezer -- they're supposedly efficient and reliable, but I can buy a lot of ice for a grand.

Then my brother-in law Trey, asked, "Why don't you just get a small chest freezer?"

Hmmmmm. The boat is always plugged in at home. We could put several gallon jugs of water in the bottom of the small chest and they'd be block ice in no time. And we have the generator which we run regularly for heat and air conditioning to give it a jolt every now and then...

So I got on the Walmart site and ordered an Danby 3.6 cubic foot freezer chest. It has a 22 X 24" footprint and stands 33" high - a great fit for the aft deck. It will take up less floor space than the cooler it's replacing.

I put an inside/outside thermometer on it to see how long it takes to bring the temp down. In two hours it was reading about 10 degrees.

So - we'll freeze some gallon jugs in her while she's at the house and figure how to make the most of this $160 unit next time we set out.


More about the freezer experiment here.