LandfallVoyages

In general, when it comes to boats, Murphy is always waiting in the wings bilge to kick up his heels and have a little fun. Gotta hand it to him, dude’s got a twisted sense of humor. Our refrigeration system went offline yesterday, which is a pretty big deal since we no longer live in San Francisco or Morro Bay, where the waters are so cold perhaps we could save the perishables by hanging them off the side of the boat in a net bag.

Anyway, the compressor started cycling on and off without really getting started, the freezer lost all its freezability, and we thought at first it was a problem of too little R-12. I know, I know–we’re bad environment-killing people, but that’s the system she came with and truthfully, since refrigeration was one of the few things that actually worked when we bought Landfall, switching over to another refrigerant has been a pretty low priority. I crawled down into the engine compartment and screwed our open canister of R-12 on to the compressor’s schrader valve and commenced shoving more refrigerant into the system. For the uninitiated, schrader valves are the same thing you find on your bike or car tire. You know, that little sticky-outie thing you hook the air hose to when you need to air up the tires. For refrigeration systems, they’ve got fancier seals inside, but still, basically identical.

Naturally, adding more R-12 did nothing to solve the problem. Neither did letting some out. We’ve got an old four-pin Danfoss compressor, without the fancy LED troubleshooter, and when I pulled the fuse on the control module, I discovered it was almost, but not quite, 100% blown. Aha! Right? Nope. No matter how many shiny new fuses I tried, we still had no joy. So we checked Facebook, to see if pictures of kittens sleeping on big dogs would help and would you believe it–even that had no effect whatsoever? Next we hit up Google, the various sailing forums, friends who might have an idea of what went wonky and–big shocker– found all of these sources were a lot more helpful than Facebook kittens. Whodathunk?

I started out on Cruiser’s Forum, with the Danfoss Compressor Bumps But Then Doesn’t Run thread, where Richard Kollmann did a such a great job of outlining the basic troubleshooting protocol for Danfoss compressors. From there, I jumped to a thread called Troubleshooting Compressors, where the inimitable GordMay once again came through with a wealth of information. Not only does he know a lot, but that guy is seriously adept at sifting though extraneous information and pulling together the best resources for whatever question you might have. Google wishes it could be half as good. GordMay pointed me to Kollmann Marine, where I discovered that Richard Kollmann has a life outside of Cruiser’s Forum, where he does things like write excellent books about marine refrigeration and now I know what I want in my Christmas stocking, come December.

The more I read, the less I liked what I learned. It looked bad. Big money bad. Likeliest culprit was a bad control unit, followed close behind by a faulty thermostat circuit. Or the whole mess needed to be retired. I grabbed a flashlight and hauled my grumpy self back into the engine room, to rig up a bypass to the thermostat. Steve flipped the circuit breaker to the On position and absolutely nothing changed. The stupid compressor kept trying to get going but always petered out in the end. Sigh. Not the thermostat. I was just getting ready to hack an LED into the control panel, to make troubleshooting the sonofabiscuit easier, when something I read in GordMay’s post, which had kind of been niggling at the back of my head for a while, finally made its way forward. Could this be something as simple as a power problem? I mean, the boat is pretty old and between the rat’s nest wiring and elderly circuit breaker board components, there might very well be enough resistance to drop the voltage below the starting threshold that’s programmed into the control panel. “What do you think?” I asked Steve. He remained dubious, but got out the multimeter and started testing the circuit breaker.

Sure enough, we had plenty of juice going into the breaker, but not enough was making it out the other side. He shuffled wires around and moved the fridge to a different circuit breaker and this time, when he flipped the switch to On, it was a whole different ballgame. The fan came on, whirring steadily away, with no dips or hesitations, and after an agonizingly long 15 or 20 seconds, the compressor actually fired up and started doing its thing exactly the way it’s supposed to. Awesome, right?

Freaking Murphy strikes again. The freezer just would not get frosty, meaning we likely only needed to top up the R-12. Except when I opened our last can of refrigerant, I didn’t have the hose hooked up right. I mean, it worked fine, pumping Freon into the system without a hitch. Uncoupled from the schrader with no problem and then sat on the pilothouse floor for a while, showing no outward signs that anything was amiss. Missing, actually, when I later grabbed the can. All the fricking fracking refrigerant leaked out of the can, ninja style. There was nothing left. You can imagine how well that went over when I broke the news to Steve. So instead of getting some down time on a Sunday afternoon, we hiked up to the bus stop and caught a combi (mini-van bus) to the Walmart in Bucerias. You can’t actually say Walmart to the driver, though. There’s just a look of confusion, a bunch of Spanglish back and forth and then, “Ooohhh! Walmar. Walmar?” “Sí, Walmar.” I guess that trailing T is a tough one. Anyhow, there’s an AutoZone right next door to Walmar, so I thought there was a better than even chance we’d find what we needed.

Took all day and we came back empty-handed except for the 500lbs of groceries we left Walmart with. Stopped and got some ice on the way down to the marina and were just gutted, really. Just low. Back at the boat, I got online and asked the FB group Women Who Sail if anybody knew where to buy R-12 around here. Should’ve done that in the first place. Verena Kellner was kind enough to point us toward Don May, who owns Fresco Marine Refrigeration Service in Nuevo Vallarta. I emailed him and first thing Monday morning, he wrote back to say that R-12 isn’t available around here, (maybe not anywhere in Mexico) but we might try R-437a, which is a replacement for the R-12 that uses compatible oils and everything. He even told us where we could get it–at a REACSA branch between Bucerias and Mezcales. It was another all day trip to get the stuff, but as of this writing, the compressor is happily humming away and there’s honest-to-gosh frost happening in the freezer.