Ice Ice Baby. Refrigeration on board.

San Diego is playing Miami today. Humidity is through the roof. It’s smoldering hot. I am sweating. Moving just a little bit feels like running a sprint. Even my brain is lazy and I can only come up with some lame 80’s song for a title.

At the moment we have an icebox as our refrigeration on board and we really want to keep it. We are putting ice in bags inside it to keep things cold, without the ice things stay cool but not cold. I thought we should keep the icebox, because fridges use a lot of electricity and freezers even more. How much energy depends very much on the size and power of the units: let’s say a fridge unit takes 4 amps, a freezer, which makes soft ice, takes 8 amps and to make hard ice takes double of that at 16 amps. On boats, fridges and freezers can use double or triple the electricity of what a radar uses.

ICE. On a day like this, ice sounds really good. Today San Diego is tropical and we are boiling. But this weather is only a rehearsal for the hot climates we will be visiting in the coming years… Right now I am imagining myself in an air-conditioned movie theatre sipping an ice cold drink. So, will we break down? I rationalize that in the hot sun the solar panels will work really, really well and could produce lots of electricity and we could have a fridge… Wait a minute! Didn’t we want to try out this reduced lifestyle? Living with less? Simply living?

Update spring 2015

It’s been 11 months that we were living without a fridge and filled the icebox with ice. We got every evening ice from either the hotel or bought a bag for 2-4$. The ice melted within a 24 hour period, depending on how often we open the icebox. For that melted water we have a gray water tank onboard which collects water from the icebox and the shower and now needed pumping out every 3-4 days. Plus all that humidity in the icebox makes food root quiet fast. We learned, that vegetables rot when in direct contact with the ice, so they need to stay on a shelf and cannot be in plastic bags. Milk products and meat need to be right next to the ice to keep for 2-3 days. Eggs, onions and fruits needed to stay outside the fridge, because of lack of room taken up by the bag of ice and also they don’t need refrigeration. We ate what was ripe and used what we shopped the same or the next day.

We got a block of ice a couple of times which was harder to get and from further away. The block melted only within 4-7 days and because it melted slower, it didn’t produce as much humidity and more like the dry cold a fridge produces. I heard that a block of ice wrapped in newspaper and then in plastic can hold up to 10 days, but we didn’t try that.

I researched alternatives to keeping and conserving foods and learned that although we think so, most of the vegetables should not be kept in the fridge. On the contrary, cooling vegetables reduces their nutritional value and they also go bad faster.

Some sailors categorically don’t allow any bananas on board. Other sailors take a bunch of bananas apart and store them separately throughout the boat. In general, fruit and vegetables should not touch because if they do that air and moisture gets trapped which speeds up the ripening process. Certain fruits, like bananas, additionally exude ethylene gas which speeds up the ripening of other fruit and vegetables next to it. That’s probably the reason why they were banned on ships and long passages. With refrigeration as our main way of food preservation, we have forgotten that knowledge and call it superstition.

While reading about food preservation I found modern pantry versions one with a fridge at the center for animal products and drinks built into shelves and drawers to keep vegetables and fruits separated.

An artist in Netherlands took this further and created wall shelves for keeping vegetables and fruits. She smartly presented beneficial vegetable combinations and storage techniques: potatoes are covered to keep out of the light with limes and apples close by and she stuck some vegetables in sand, just like my grandmother stored root vegetables in sand in her cellar over winter.

We have met cruisers without fridges, who use an icebox, and some, who don’t use any refrigeration. It is doable to live without a fridge! Essentially only animal products need refrigeration. There are many old-school methods for food preservation like canning, drying, fermenting and pickling. Many cruisers can meat prior to long passages in pressure cookers or buy dried meats like salami. Powdered milk holds forever and is very popular for making milk, yogurt and cheese. Aged, hard cheese hold for months anyway and there are vinegar cloths or bees wax cloths available for wrapping cheese to prevent molding in humid climates. Bread bought in stores holds for a long time, but sometimes we spray it on the outside to prevent molding, again the harder the bread the longer it holds. Eggs don’t need to be in the fridge if they have never been refrigerated, make sure to get unrefrigerated eggs and turn them every 3-4 days and they will hold for a month or two.

Update fall 2015

We finally broke down recently and installed a small Adler Barbor Dometic fridge unit. It is a mini freezer compartment the size of 6 ice trays and, like a cold plate, it cools the rest of the icebox. We originally had a 9 cubic feet icebox, which we halved, and use only one side as fridge and we use the other side for cool, dry, dark storage similar to a basement where we store onions and root vegetables. We are in the process of experimenting how many amps the new fridge uses: we have it running at the highest setting, outside temperature is 25 C during the day and 12 C at night and it is currently using 4 amps.

Update summer 2017

After cruising for eighteen months, we found that our solar panels (with total of 180 W) don’t produce enough power in the winter for the fridge, water pressure pump and electronic device chargers. At anchor in the evening at 10 pm, the batteries are usually down at around 70-80%. We have normal AGM batteries, which should never go under 65%, so we turn the fridge off over night for about 5 hours. We make sure to have at least 3 gallons of water in bottles in the fridge and don’t open the fridge for one hour before turning it of and wait one hour before opening it in the morning. That has worked for us and the fridge didn’t defrost during the night.

When we provision for longer passages or longer stays at anchor, we keep nearly all fruits and vegetables outside of the fridge in supply hammocks. We buy vegetables and fruits keeping in mind to use them soon (riper) and later (as green and unripe as possible). Back on the boat, we lay everything out on towels and for a couple hours let dry off any condensation from being refrigerated or from the way from the store to the boat, because condensation and moisture can cause molding.

Then we pack them in brown sandwich bags, packed lightly and leave open on top. We label the bags with ‘tomatoes ripe’ and ‘tomatoes new’ for example and we use the aft hammock for ripe produce and the forward hammock for new/unripe produce. We tie the hammocks to the ceiling so that they don’t swing while sailing, because the movement ripens fruits and vegetables and also can bruise them… We found that we can go 10-14 days in between provisioning with fresh foods, checking the bags every morning and eating what’s ripe.

Update October 2017

We just got back to the boat and found a lot of mold in the fridge. Yuck! A beer can we had left in the turned-off fridge had exploded from the heat in the cabin. Over the summer month, Puerto Peñasco can get very hot. The fridge partition was rotten and we took it out. To compensate for the increased energy need of the now enlarged fridge, we added a 125 watt solar panel on the dodger, so that we now have 395 watt of solar power from the panels. We also added a MMP charge controller for smart charging of the batteries.

Update March 2019

We missed a season and are back in the water now. The solar panels are charging the batteries during the day, the fridge runs the batteries down at night but not too far (to about 75%) and in the morning the solar charges them back up to a 100% by 11 am. So far so good.

When we got further south to hot waters, the fridge was running all the time and the solar power wasn’t enough. The problem might be also that our batteries are getting old, more than 6 years, but they kept dipping dangerously low and once morning to 55%! I immediately turned off the fridge until the sun recharged the batteries. Pew! Sometimes we had to run the generator to top off the batteries in the evening.

We generate power only by solar panels and don’t have a wind turbine to generate energy during the night. We don’t have space on our small transom for a wind turbine pole so that we will get a small vertical wind generator mountable on the mast, hoping those become available soon for boats. Or, we could buy Lithium batteries: they run around $3.000 for four batteries including a charging computer and extras and can be not only run down much lower than standard batteries to 20% without a problem and they charge back up very fast. When we hauled out another cruiser had his batteries checked, apparently not all batteries go bad at the same time and one battery can spoil the whole set. This sounds like a cheaper solution because Lithium batteries are not in our budget at the moment.

And Radu wants to build a whole new fridge with optimal, modern isolation and better layout. We’ll see.