Digging Into the Freezer

Eolian has a freezer. It is an excellent freezer, in that it really, umm, freezes things well.

It is not just a small compartment inside the evaporator plates for the refrigerator, suitable for holding 3 small boxes of frozen peas entombed in lump of frost. Instead, it is a completely separate compartment. But it is not the shape of your conventional household freezer. This is a boat - it was shoehorned into an available space. It is about 3 feet deep, and about 13" square on the inside, making it about 3.5 cubic feet - an incredibly huge freezer for a boat. It is equipped with two holding plates, which make the cold last all day long without additional refrigeration input. (But these take up some of that 3.5 cubic feet - believe me, it is worth it.)

Now measure your arms. Are they 3 feet long? Didn't think so. So, how would you retrieve that bag of frozen crab on the very bottom of the freezer?

Exactly.

Oh, and it is difficult to get the whole length of your arm to work for you, because the freezer is back in the corner of the galley counter space, pretty much where it is least accessible.

Finally, as a consequence of The Second Law of Accessibility, whatever it is that you want to retrieve from the freezer, is on the bottom.

Last summer when we were off the dock for two weeks, I made sure the freezer was full, since it works best at retaining temperature when it is full, by using up the slack space with a milk jug full of water. It easily wedged into the space between the holding plates at the lower back of the freezer, because milk jugs are very flexible. Problem solved!

Well not quite.

Now how do I get that jug out of there? Of course now that it is frozen, it will not come out of the space... I am going to have to defrost the whole system and melt that jug to be able to get it out. That will take a long time (days, in fact). A good plan, gone bad thru a botched execution.

Still, we absolutely love our freezer!

Digging Into the Freezer