Refrigeration- 50-80% less daily power possible?

[Q Xopa]

OK this is being done. It is a science project and is unlikely to ever be main stream but the attraction is obvious, particularly for sailboats that haven’t got the luxury of being plugged into the grid often.

There are good reasons this will never become mainstream. Up front cost is one. But the biggest one is that the big elec appliance boys are selling too many of their units.

The other thing is that while there is a wall socket that can be easily plugged into why would anyone want to bother with the trouble and expnce of doing a solar water heater install. The answer is they wouldn’t.

I like to think of boat systems holistically. Like in nature, who has had millions of years to learn and evolve from her mistakes. Everything in nature is connected and has multiple functions to survive as an complete eco system.

So when someone suggests a solar water heater to me I’m thinking how else can this benefit, and tie into other systems on our boat Radiant Solar Water Heating System - Â* Â* Â*Custom Marine Products - Marine Solar Systems . There are implications and impacts both positive and negative. So my mind drifts to thoughts like hot water- I know people are using it to reduce power consumption for refrigeration and store it in lieu of expensive batteries using clever, but simple, priority sequencing.

I know I’m guilty of thread drift and some people don’t want to hear LFP batts and Inverter powered UPSs when talking about DC Gens. But to me we sometimes also need to look at the big overall picture to see how something can best work in the boat as a whole system.

Seeing refrigeration on boats is generally such a large portion of our daily power budget wouldn’t it be good if we could reduce it. And perhaps have some added side benefit like some shower water. Sounds good to me.

Solakool | Solar hybrid air conditioning Australian company, quotes upto 80% power reduction

Microsolar System Water Heater Malaysian company. Claims 50% reduction in daily energy consumption. I have met and talked to the guy behind this. I am only a dumb helicopter engineer but I have seen his setups. I bought him a cup of coffee and picked his brain for hours. He is brilliant. As I said the commercial reality is that it will never be a raging success but, I think it definitely has some uses.

There are other makers I know of that have, and are doing this stuff. I saw one of these set up on a bank building in Panama. When I looked up the company, in the US it had gone. But I saw it working.

I’m thinking this could be a great concept if done for small sailboat refrigeration.

This also starts to make boat air conditioning closer to doable combined with LFP batts becoming another more popular option.

Solar panels are also becoming more affordable. Could our water heater stuck to the back of our PV panels also cool our PV seeing it sucking heat out of them? Sounds like another potential side benefit.

I’m sure you guys will come up with many reasons this sort of stuff wont work. I’m not trying to convince anyone here, I’m not convinced myself. Simply putting it out there for some thought and discussion. Maybe the collective wisdom has something to progress some of this maybe not.