Maintenance and Systems – ideas to share

Cool it

Do you have water cooled refrigeration? If you do, you have a water pump that pumps sea water through your compressor to help make the system more efficient than when it’s just cooling with the fan. However, if it’s cool inside the engine room, the cooling fan is generally sufficient, so there’s no need to run the water pump, adding extra power usage and hours on the pump. So what do we do?

Well, on Arctic Dream, a ’98 GB 42 classic in our fleet, the previous owner came up with a clever idea. He plugged his water pump for the refrigeration into a thermostatically controlled power strip and set the thermometer to 78 degrees. So when the engine room in 78 or cooler, the fan cools the compressor, but when the engine room is hotter (when you are underway), the water pump cools the compressor helping it run more efficiently in that hot environment!