Totally disagree... How the guy mentioned in your link lasted 30 years in
marine refrigeration is beyond me! How could anyone advocate using a 2cc
compressor unit to refrigerate a sixteen pound eutectic plate? That is crazy or perhaps its the Arctic version!
In the eutectic / cyclic test I recently posted, we used a moderately insulated 150 litre cabinet with a 3.3 litre Eutectic tank coupled to a 3.5cc
compressor unit.
That same cabinet / system was data logged again recently with 40 litres of
water in containers inside cabinet, and in a cooler
environment than my previous test as can be seen on the data below. The initial cabinet pull down from 22.0C to 4.0C took a little over 2.5 hours but 4.1 hours to complete the first phase change. Thereafter it ran just once per day and for approx 2 hours each time.
Now in many situations (specially if a system has ECO2
power management) that ONE run per day would occur after the
batteries are topped up and the ongoing
solar,
wind or what ever would otherwise have be wasted. Result: NO
POWER DRAIN from
battery bank, none, zero, zilch. Using 'abundant power' to re-freeze the eutectic mass! Now you can't get more power efficient than that!
The eutectic system's initial pull down is a little slower than using a cyclic plate, but a small
price to pay when the overall power savings are considered. Besides most cruisers leave their fridge on 24/7 so first pull down of a warm cabinet's temperature is not an issue.
Here are some initial results from further testing..
Cheers OzePete