Keeping Cool

If you talk to charter crews who do week-long all-inclusive vacations like we do, you’ll likely hear that one of their biggest boat challenges is refrigeration. The small boat-sized fridges and freezers that do well for 2-4 people are often a tad undersized to keep the huge amount of food that we serve at its freshest. We know of several people who have Leopard 4600s who have either installed secondary refrigeration, or customized normal coolers to be powered by a separate refrigerator compressor. We debated on all of these options but opted at this time to instead purchase a new Engel 12V cooler.

The cooler came packaged extremely well!
It actually arrived last week when we were out on charter.

Over the years I have heard nothing but great things about the Engel coolers so I was pretty sure that the quality would be what we wanted. Our biggest decision was selecting the size that would be most appropriate for us, given that it is our intention to store the cooler under the main salon table. We also needed to determine the best way to get one into our hands. Fortunately for us, we found that there is an Engel distributor here on St. Thomas, Neptune Fishing Supplies, and while they didn’t have the exact unit that we wanted in stock, they were able to have one shipped in with little delay.

Rebecca and I finally picked up our cooler the day before yesterday and my initial impression is that it looks good. The cooler was packed extremely well and when we took it out of the box, the build quality looked excellent. We plugged the cooler in and noted that it drew approx. 2.5 amps upon startup. We played around with the temperature control a bit to find the best setting for refrigeration as the unit we chose can also act as a freezer if it is turned up high enough. When I left the cooler plugged in overnight, with nothing in it I might add, our battery voltage was still acceptable in the morning. People on boats know how important it is to have electrical units that are efficient and draw little power.

While we don’t have a ton of food on board at this moment (that will all change this Saturday as we provision for our next set of guests who arrive on Sunday), we put the cooler to the test by transferring all of our refrigerated items into it so that we could defrost our main fridge. As we had hoped, it worked perfectly.

What does a unit like this cost, delivered to St. Thomas? About 1 boat buck (that’s a thousand dollars to the uninitiated). In terms of how helpful we think this will be on our charters, I would guess it’ll be priceless. Isn’t it nice that we work for a boat owner who understands that in order to satisfy our clients, we need to spend money? We sure think so!

I have heard nothing but good things about Engel coolers.

It has a secret weapon… cool!

I don’t know who Dave is but someone must think that he is clumsy.

Our cooler in its new home, under the salon table, where Rebecca will have easy access to it when preparing meals.