The boat house extension is now looking pretty good. As you can see below, we have coolers, SCUBA tanks, shelving with boat supplies and parts and of course our Manitowoc commercial ice machine which can produce 950 lbs of clear half cube restaurant grade ice per 24 hours.
The back connections for power and water have been made and the required drains got plumbed to the outside of the boat house extension.
2022/10/14 update. Today we made our first ice. It took us some time to get this working because the water system in the ice maker was not working. But the unit has the ability to show inputs and outputs and we could see that the solenoid that fills the water tray which is used to make ice from was energized although no water was being allowed through. So we took the solenoid out and found that its strainer was completely clogged with PVC dust which had been generated by us using an angle grinder to cut the PVC with. That dust shot down the pipe and the pipe was not flushed before connection to the ice machine. Lesson learned: cut PVC with a PVC cutter and not an angle grinder. We cleaned out the strainer and put it back together and it is working perfectly. One upside of this debug effort is that we learned just how simple the system is and we can now do all the service and repairs needed ourselves.
We are still not out of the woods yet because this is a 240 VAC 50Hz model that we are running on 240 VAC 60Hz. so the compressor is running 20% faster than it should. There is mixed advice on the web about doing this (but no disagreement that going the other way around - running a 60Hz appliance on 50 Hz - is a bad idea that will quickly damage something). But I did a lot of research on this over the past year and there was enough evidence from "old hands" suggesting that it would work fine. Time will tell but for now it is aces.
A couple more points of interest are that once we started the unit, it autodetected $1400 worth of factory upgrades, both having to do with self cleaning which is apparently a big deal for commercial ice makers that run all the time. The base unit consisting of compressor head and insulated bin run about $8000 at Katom kitchen supply (a big name in the field). So this unit is worth $9400 since it is brandy new. KO and I paid $2200 delivered to pville. That's one of my best eBay deals ever. Then of course shipping, duty, and vat to Freeport. But I think we avoided duty under SERZ by listing it as refrigeration.
Another detail is that while we have a reverse osmosis unit that should keep up with this, right now it is running straight off of city water without any filtering. The ice is not crystal clear but it tastes good. Once we insert the RO unit I would expect perfectly clear ice.
When run at 50 Hz, the ice maker head on this unit will make 950 lbs per day if the input water is 70f and air temp is 90f (which are conservative figures for Freeport). The bin will hold about 540 lbs. We let it run for a 3 hours and it certainly put out 100 lbs as seen in the pix below. Since the compressor is being overdriven by 20% (running on 60Hz instead of 50Hz) I suspect we could see a production rate of over 1100 lbs per 24 hrs.
This bit of infrastructure is kind of a big deal to us because without it you have to run to the grocery store and buy 10 lb bags of ice in order to prepare for a good offshore trip or even more for a multiple day trip. We can currently hold about 600 lbs of ice on the boat and if we were taking a week long trip we would probably take at least 450 lbs in order to avoid having to buy ice out on the water at $1 per lb. We calculate that it would take about $10 of electricity in order to create 500 lbs of ice. Since we only have about $3000 into the machine, delivered, it doesn't take a math genius to see that this will pay for itself in a few seasons of big use.
As mentioned above, we are getting this result of Freeport city water which is none too good. Most of the locals won't drink it. They drink bottled water. But this ice tastes perfectly good. Still, it should be crystal clear and I think we can achieve that (and reduce the crud build up in the machine) by feeding it reverse osmosis water. Problem with most RO machines is that they cannot keep up with the required feed rate of this unit. So to deal with that we got a tankless RO unit (Waterdrop G2 model WD-G2-W) which produces clean water faster by using an integrated high pressure pump to force water past the membrane instead of relying on city water pressure.
2022/11/03 update. This update documents the insertion of the Reverse Osmosis water maker. Prior to adding this filtration the ice didn't taste bad but was not perfectly clear. We knew that we could not use a normal under sink reverse osmosis system (as seen below, left) for two main reasons: size and capacity. The normal units are pretty big and then require a separate tank with delicate hoses running back and forth.
That was not desirable but the real show stopper was the slow production rate of crystal clear reverse osmosis water of these kinds of machines which simply rely on the pressure of city water to move the water across the RO membrane. Below, right is a new kind of under sink water maker called the Waterdrop G2. It pushes water through the membrane several times faster than the style on the left because it uses an integrated pump to boost the pressure. That means that the unit needs to be plugged into an AC source whereas the legacy style on the left do not. Also, the filters on the left are cheaper than those on the Waterdrop unit. But without sufficient on demand capacity, the left hand style simply would not work.
Here is the unit mounted to a shelf that I installed on the back of the ice machine bin so that the G2 connections were close to the ice machine head. It will be easy to observe and maintain in this location. This picture also gives you some idea of the size which is about 15" long, 6" wide and perhaps 13 inches tall. The Waterdrop G2 seems like a very well made product and it was dead simple to hook up. Servicing the filters on this is done from the front of the unit. It's a very nice product IMO and at $300 at the time of this writing on Amazon, not overpriced for what you get.
Here is a short video that gives you some idea of the flow rate of reverse osmosis water that this unit produces. What's nice about this is that the Waterdrop production is controlled by a pressure switch. When the faucet is closed, pressure builds and the internal electric pump shuts off. When pressure drops, the pump motor comes back on. This kind of on demand behavior is exactly what we needed for the Manitowoc unit.
Here is a short video showing first production of ice and it is all crystal clear and tasting great. The video doesn't do it much justice so here is a still picture that shows it is totally clear.
So there it is, the culmination of significant vision, strategy, tactics, cash expenditure and operational execution by TKO (Tobias & Kyle Odiorne) that will make future days in the Bahamas just a little bit cooler.
No comments:
Post a Comment