We were fortunate to be in Baltimore just as the marina was going to throw away the rest of their ice for the season. We gladly took 300 pounds of block ice off of their hands. It has lasted just over a month and we need to replenish in Charleston. The rate at which the ice lasts, the warmer weather in our future destination and the availability of ice in the Bahamas has us wondering if installing refrigeration would save us money in the next year.
Tomorrow I am going to call an ice distributor to see if they sell blocks of ice. Apparently they are not used that frequently anymore with the invention of electricity. The blocks last exponentially longer than cubes. Hopefully they will deliver a reasonable amount of ice.
The verdict is out on the refrigeration. It isn't cheap, but ice in the Caribbean may be nonexistent. I will probably do what I usually do when I have this type of conundrum on the boat - go to the message boards and seek advice.
1 comments:
Funny, I have been pondering the question of refridgeration onboard recently myself and, for what its worth, here are my thoughts. I came to the conclusion that for me, I did not want a refridgerator because of the prohibitive and constant power requirements.
So, while I have not tried it yet, I did do some looking at ice makers. Now I don't know how much ice you would need on a day to day basis but a quick perusal of the ones for sale on walmart.com claim that they can make 12 cubes in 10 minutes and 35 lbs. a day. Which got me thinking that maybe you could just run the ice maker when you needed it and keep it turned off until you needed more, so the hope would be that you could use alot less electricity than a fridge would require.
Again, I have no idea how this would play out in real life but it sounded good in theory. By the way, the walmart ice makers were running about $250. But anyways, I'll be looking forward to hear how you decide to tackle this problem so please post.
Good Luck!
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