Why build your own freezer
Planning to live aboard their boat for a long time, Matt and Joni decided to fit Duracell with a freezer. There are marine freezers on the market. But from the galley plan drawn up for the refit of the yacht, a logical location in a corner near the starboard side wall implied unusual dimensions. Matt therefore decided to build the freezer himself, creating a well-insulated box in which to install heat exchangers, connected to a commercially available compressor.
A double-insulated freezer
To build his freezer, Matt starts by assembling 5 sides of a parallelepiped in sandwich panels with fiberglass on each side. Once glued with superglue, he filleted the inside face with plaster to achieve a good surface finish, then laminated the outside corners.
To insulate the fridge properly, 50 mm thick extruded polystyrene panels are glued in place. With two thicknesses of this R10 insulation, 100 mm of insulation are added all around the box, by gluing, having taken care to check the behavior of the foam with glue solvents.
Once the parallelepiped has been finalized, all that remains to be done is to finish off the closing and inner surfaces. Matt adds foam-sandwich lips to ensure that the future lid is watertight, preventing condensation and mildew in the freezer. A coat of primer is followed by a well-sanded filler to ensure a flat surface with no irregularities that would make cleaning difficult, and all that's left for Matt to do is apply a coat of the food-grade paint he's already applied to the water tanks.
