Couple of quiet days without any major mishaps—just more typical minor ones.
My business partner was joking with me the other day about the fact that we never even did a shakedown cruise with this boat. I reminded him that, A) we never do shakedown cruises with our boats, and B) If we’re going to sail around the world, then a 3,000 mile passage is about 8% of the overall trip, which seems like a pretty good shakedown. Essentially, the Pacific Crossing is the shakedown trip for the rest of the world. Makes sense to me.
Having a bit of trouble with the port engine’s alternator which seems to be running at too high a voltage (I’ve seen 16.06v), causing an engine alarm, even though voltages seem to be okay on the batteries, but not getting dropped low enough coming out of the alternator regulator. Not that easy to troubleshoot right now as we don’t want to waste fuel, and we especially don’t want to create a bigger problem when we are this far out at sea. For the time being I’ve disconnected the alternator.
Power has been an issue, too. Mainly because of these Isotherm fridges and freezer. None of them ever seem to shut off, so I’m reading an insane draw of something like 360ah/day, which is just about all of our usable battery storage. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly 7x more power than our two large refrigerators on the Grand Banks used per day. This is a problem that’s going to have to be addressed, because it’s totally unsustainable.
The kids are doing fantastic. It’s incredible to me how well they adapt to whatever situation they are put into. We usually get 1-2 hours of internet time in the mornings where they can play games, watch videos, and chat with friends. After that they spend the day reading, making funny movies, drawing, watching a movie, or just laying around with their thoughts. They laugh and play, and are always in a good mood. They’re better at this than me and Ali.
Each morning at Wanderer Financial in our daily chat we have people checking in from all over the world, posting pics of their “office” for the day or just showing the rest of us what we’ve been up to. This was a morning selfie to show them that I was indeed hanging out with them and working from deep in the Pacific Ocean.
Ali stumbled on this card game called Bumfuzzle a while ago, but we never got around to playing it until now. It’s pretty fun. We have nothing to do with the game, and never even heard from the maker.
It’s really beautiful when the conditions cooperate to fly this big sail.
Ali has been doing a good job on this passage of updating our Facebook page with a quick daily update and a map, if you’re interested in also following along there. We’ve also got an Instagram page going, though I wouldn’t bet $1 on that being updated regularly.
9 Comments on “Easy Sailing”
I have isotherm, they use just under 3amps and only about 10min on then off for 25. In the bahamas (not up in cold weather) so i yours are always on i’d guess you have a bad thermostat
Good luck muchacho!
Looks like good times at sea. Nice.
Not sure if you will see it, but I made a comment with some information that might be helpful for your refrigerators/freezers. If they are isotherm they probably are using the Danfoss/Secop BD35 or BD50.
Summary: Check airflow into the compressor (and make sure it’s not sucking in the hot exhaust air in a loop) (as others mentioned). Should be at least 25 square inches in and out (clear flow), but the more the merrier.
Also check which resistor you have on the control board (the black box all the wires go into, across terminals C and T near the bottom). If you have no resistor or a low-ohm resistor, you’ll be running at lower rpm. I know my own Vitrifrigo will keep up just fine all winter at the lowest rpm. But then in summer with hot temps the duty cycle creeps up until I change the resistor value to bump up the rpm.
There’s more detail in my comment on your previous post if you are interested.
I don’t think packing the freezer tightly should hurt anything, btw. I mean I sure pack mine, and people with big chest freezers pack them full too. Maybe if it’s running weakly that would matter though. Or if putting a lot of warm stuff in at once (this is another case where higher rpm helps – some refrigerators have a “turbo mode” type button which, what that’s doing is just bumping up the rpm while in that mode).
PS: If you have a bad thermistor they can run constantly, as the first commentor mentioned. They tend to default to “on” not “off.” But if the freezer were working properly, then you would have Ultra-Frozen stuff, as it would just get colder and colder since the compressor wouldn’t shut off.
So my money is on either a lack of air intake/exhuast openings; a setup that allows the fan to suck the exhaust air back in to be the supposed “cool” air to cool the compressor; or a resistor that has it running at too low an rpm to deal with warm temps, and/or needing to freeze (vs. refrigerate).
Thanks, Luna. Once we get anchored I’ll dig in a bit. All the fridges, at first glance appear to suffer from a lack of airflow.
Hi Pat,
No expert but I too have the Danfoss BD50 with a front opening fridge. In Guadeloupe now and my compressor (fridge only) is pulling 7 amps x24hr = 168 amps. It too appears to be on continuously. My fridge engineer told me to keep dust away from the cooling fins and to blow compressed air on it. You could use a dinghy pump at a push.
Fair winds, Gerry
No way I go near Facebook or Instagram.
What do they sell, other than your personal data?
No thanks.
Okay, thanks.
Fishing, bird watching, flying fish on deck for breakfast, take a break for a swim? These are the things I enjoyed on my crossing last year. Loving following this latest adventure, Starlink is amazing.
We haven’t been becalmed for a swim, yet, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately. Even our calmest day that we motored through had a few knots of wind.