fridge insulation

I figured it would take me one weekend to install the insulation for the fridge box. Possibly two weekends if something went horribly wrong. That was back in February. I just finished the insulation install Friday. By my count, that task took two weekends plus or minus 8 weekends. Granted, I really wasn't working on the fridge the whole time. There was a lot of downtime this winter due to weather and generally lack of motivation (at least two of those weekends back in February were devoted to The Wire marathons).

My original plan was to install 2" XPS (extruded polystyrene) sheets underneath the fridge box and against the hull. XPS is good at resisting water entry but has a slightly lower R value of R5. I planned on using polyisocyanurate on the inboard walls where I had less space for insulation. Polyiso is rated at R6.5 but it doesn't deal well with moisture. It also doesn't handle being cut and manipulated nearly as well as it tends to crumble. I decided to use it only on the inboard facing wall next to the sink, mostly because it proved to be a real pain in the ass. The rest of the walls in the fridge got the XPS treatment. Against the curve of the hull above the waterline where the sun hits the hull, I glued Reflectix onto the outward face of XPS boards and left about a one inch air gap between the hull and insulation. The idea is to reflect radiative heat transfer from the sun hitting the hull. I have no idea if this will make a difference but given the difficulty of matching rectilinear foam boards with the curve of the hull, I was going to end up with an air gap anyways, so I thought I'd take advantage of it.


XPS sheets being installed in the floor. The pink and blue sheets are both XPS, just different manufacturers.


Polyisocyanurate insulation installed on the inboard wall.


The reflectix insulation installed against the hull.

Given the oppressive amounts of cold beer and ice I plan on storing in this fridge box, I needed some structure to support the weight of the box. My goal was to provide some beefy structure without having to cut out much insulation. I ended up using 2" aluminum angle iron mounted longitudinally under the fridge box. I through-bolted epoxy covered brackets on the fore and aft cabinet walls and laid the aluminum beam on top of those brackets to sit flush with a layer of insulation. I used the same material mounted under the countertop to support the vertical walls of the fridge box.


Longitudinal aluminum angle iron support.

My construction process went a little something like this:

• First, I installed an epoxy covered wood standoff on the cabinet floor so if any moisture got into the cabinet, the insulation would not sit in it. I drilled a few weep holes from the floor into the bilge so water couldn't build up.
• I put a layer of builder's plastic against the hull. The idea was if the deck to hull joint or deck stanchion started leaking into the cabinet, it wouldn't penetrate the insulation. I didn't encapsulate the entire insulation in a vapor barrier because I've read that all that does is trap moisture inside the insulation. A more accurate way of stating that would be: I encapsulated the entire insulation in a vapor barrier THEN I read that all that does is trap moisture inside the insulation THEN I spent a weekend removing the vapor barrier and three tubes of silicon I used to hang the vapor barrier.
• The only option we had to run wiring for the compressor install is currently crammed with wiring and would require removing some wire to accomodate the compressor wiring. Given that I had 9" to 11" of space for insulation against the hull near the top of the box, I decided to install a wiring conduit in the back of the box. I'm not wild about this choice. Cutting the insulation around the conduit was a giant pain.
• Cut and dry fit foam for a single wall. This is a very iterative process when you have to work through the opening (oh, this perfectly cut piece of foam doesn't fit inside the opening) and when you have a complex curve and fridge box that steps down (oh, this perfectly cut piece of foam doesn't actually fit the space it's supposed to fit in).
• Once I got all the pieces cut and dry fit (and labeled, all the pieces start to look the same after a while), I installed the insulation for that wall. I caulked every seam and joint with silicon to make sure that there was no air passage through the insulation. Every gap larger than 1/8", got injected with spray foam. Here's a tip with spray foam: wear latex gloves and a long sleeve shirt when using this crap. You'll think you're being all super careful and cautious and then your wife will point and guffaw at the cabbage-sized glob of spray foam hanging on your elbow of which portions will remain stuck to you three days later.
• Once the spray foam cured, I'd trim it back down and coat any exposed spray foam with silicon. Spray foam doesn't like moisture either. One other note about spray foam: it cures with some pretty large air bubbles in it so don't depend on it for any large voids. I relied on it more as way to prevent air passage, rather than proper insulation.
• Once the wall was done, I moved on to the next wall. Lather, rinse, repeat.
• After all the insulation was in place, I caulked all the seams a final time with silicon to make sure no air was going to leak through the box.

The end result of all this foam cutting and fitting and caulking:

• 9" of XPS insulation below the fridge box.
• Anywhere from 5" to about 11" of XPS insulation against the hull.
• 4" of XPS insulation on the aft cabinet wall.
• 6" of XPS insulation on the forward cabinet wall.
• 3" of polyisocyanurate insulation plus 3/4" of layers of reflectix because I couldn't find 3/4" foam boards.

Bare fridge cabinet.


Standoff installed.


Plastic installed against the hull.


Floor insulation complete along with brackets for longitudinal support beam.


Aluminum angle iron acting as a support beam.


Inboard wall with polyiso insulation and then covered with Reflectix. You can also see the aluminum angle iron used as a support for the vertical fridge walls.


Forward wall complete.


Aft wall complete.


This was all the foam I used in just the top half of the outboard wall against the hull.


I think I cut about 30 individual pieces of foam to fit the outboard wall.


Insulation is DONE!




Sizing some of the foam pieces.


Our disaster of a cockpit during construction. I did all the foam cutting in our cockpit. Any attempt to cut foam on the dock ended up with foam particles in the water and that's no bueno.

If you feel that you just haven't gotten enough pictures of pink and blue foam, I took an extensive amount of photos and uploaded them here.

iverson dodger, bimini and cockpit enclosure

We sailed for a few years with Hello World's original canvas cockpit covers. The dodger windows were mostly opaque and distorted. The bimini canvas was easier to see through than the windows. The material was started to decompose and fall apart. The frames were rusty and flimsy. Any attempt to prevent a crew overboard in a seaway by grabbing hold of our dodger or bimini would have ended with a very startled crew member swimming next a pile of stainless steel and blue canvas.

No longer, people.

We employed the services of Iversons Designs to remedy our canvas woes. And remedy them, they did. We spoke with Jason Iverson at the boat show about what we were looking for. The interesting thing about Iverson's is that they don't really go to your boat and quote you a price. They have a standard price for their dodgers and biminis and standard prices for all the extras so he was able to give us a quote without knowing anything about our boat. The first time they step foot on your boat, they are there to build.

We requested a new dodger, bimini, solar panel mounts on top of the bimini, a full cockpit enclosure and just about every extra option we could get our grubby hands on. We also ponied up a little extra for the dodger that allows us to completely zip out all the windows and store them below. After handing over a $300 deposit back in February, we reluctantly waited our turn. If you want what they got, pack a lunch because you're going to wait for it. Finally, in mid-April we got a call asking if they could start the next day.

The build team came out and talked with us for a bit about what we wanted. They were very accomodating to our requests. Even though he didn't write anything down in our 30 minute conversation, he nailed everything I asked for. By the end of the day, we had our new stainless steel frames. I got to the boat after work and found the bimini frame to be a bit lower than I'd like. I sent an email asking them to raise it an inch or two. I waited for the reply giving me all kinds of excuses about why they couldn't raise it (the boom was perilously close, the stainless steel frames were already cut, bent and installed), but 10 minutes later I got an email quickly telling me "no problem at all". The next time they came out, the bimini frame was sure enough, two inches higher.

A word of caution about their install. They will bed every bit of hardware into the deck with 3M 5200. If you ever want a shot at removing any of their bedded hardware, you have to request they use something else. I didn't mind the snaps to the deck installed with 5200 but I did not want the frame footings mounted with 5200. Since all they carried was 5200 and silicon, I gave them a tube of 4200. Later in the summer when the weather improves, I'll pull the footings off, over drill the holes, fill with expoxy and through bolt the footings through the deck. At that point I'll bed the bolts with something a little more sealant like (3M 101 or butyl sealant) and a little less adhesive like.

Over a period of two weeks, they installed the dodger, bimini, solar panel mounts and finally the cockpit enclosure. Since then, I have poured over every inch of their work. The craftsmanship is excellent. Full of small details you don't notice at first like a small flashlight above the companionway, snaps to hold the cockpit enclosure panels out of the way when unzipped, and grab loops at exactly the right place when you need to pull the fabric together to zip panels together. Every possible chafe point is protected with at a minimum some kind of vinyl fabric and in several places with leather. Many of the seams and edges have two or three rows of stitching in place. And? It looks good. These guys have a keen eye for aesthetics. Covering the ass end of your boat with reams of canvas can turn out pretty ungainly. We've seen plenty of examples where canvas has gone horribly wrong. This installation looks like a natural extension of the boat, like Caliber had this in mind the whole time.

Let's be clear: this quality comes at a price. Iverson is not in the business of giving these things away. His prices seem to be incrementally more expensive than others out there. If you just went with the standard dodger and bimini, you're probably going to pay in the same ballpark as you would elsewhere (surprisingly, Mexico was not really any cheaper). We super-sized our canvas order so we're paying a pretty healthy bill. But given the quality of work and responsiveness we received, we'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Now, every night Christy and I have dinner out in the cockpit. We sit up there browsing the internet or reading. When we're home we rarely put the hatchboards in, even if it's 48 degrees and pouring rain. The cockpit enclosure has essentially given us another room on the boat. And this room has a bitchin' water view.























(Disclosure: We have no affiliation with Iverson's Design other than being a one-time customer. When a marine vendor does good work and treats us well, we want to let people know about it.)

geometry of to-do lists

Every once in a while, I run across a quote that's so relevant and well spoken I wish I'd said it myself. From Steve of s/v Nomadness:

To-Do lists are fractal. The closer you zoom into one item, the more it expands into a cluster of component items.

And so it goes. Continued progress on the fridge rebuilding front. A blog post coming soon.

Trust me, it's on my to-do list.

what we learned about cruising

I've been meaning to write this post for about 9 months now. Some of our experiences have been dulled by time. However, after not quite a year being back in the real world, this is a pretty good list of what stuck.

A couple caveats here. One, we are not drawing on vast experience prior to leaving and we were only out for one year so any expertise we're implying by the slightly pretentious title of this post is merely self-inflating. Two, this is entirely based on our experiences. Your mileage may vary. We're not big fans of people telling us what to do with our boat, so please don't take this as a missive to tell you what to do with yours. Whilst out cruising yourself, you may come to learn that the crew of s/v Hello World had their heads clean up their ass.

1. If you're going to sail in the tropics, do not underestimate the value of cold beer.
2. Everything on a boat is in a constant state of decomposition. If it is not broken, it will be soon. If it says "Rule" or "Jabsco" on it, it's probably already broken - you just don't know it yet.
3. Do not underestimate the value of a ridiculously sized anchor. It may not make any difference at all in terms of holding. I truly believe the recommended 55lb Rocna anchor would have held us just fine in all the conditions we faced. However, as a cruising friend of ours put it: "your anchor is a 73lb sleeping pill." Amen.
4. Having two heads (toilets) is mostly a waste of space until your primary head breaks.
5. When your primary head is broken, your second head will probably break within three days. (See item #2)
6. Having a bucket as your third head will accelerate your desire to fix head number one.
7. We anchored at 5:1 scope (for every foot of water depth, we let out five feet of chain) unless we absolutely could not. This boat is our house, our home, our future and our primary financial investment. We don't put it at risk lightly.
8. If you haven't gone cruising before, you are probably reading everything you can get your hands on about it. You devour Lin and Larry Pardey books, blogs, forums until you're blue in the face. You argue the merits of anchors you've never actually used or set (why should I let knowledge get in the way of my opinions?). In all this information, you are creating predefined expectations about what your experience will be like. You're mentally preparing yourself on how to set a sea anchor, rig covers for when a rogue wave blows out your portholes, create a rudder from a cabin door, bend on a trysail in 50 knots. This is all good information and we did exactly the same thing. But try to keep this in mind, too. Many of your predefined expectations will not match reality. You spend 80% of your time and money preparing for ocean passages and come to realize you spend 90% of your time no more than 3 miles from land, day hopping between anchorages. You will spend more time battling your engine and plumbing than battling Neptune.
9. We are bad at judging distances in an anchorage and how much room we have. Fortunately, our radar is very good at judging distances. We used it often to confirm that we could squeeze into a space. Or the guy that just anchored right in front of us is way too close.
10. If someone does anchor too close, approach them with a smile. Most of the time, they are great people you will be happy to have met who just misjudged the available space. One day, you'll be on the other end of that dinghy ride.
11. Having a cover from the sun in Mexico is invaluable. Keep a cover over your boat and over your head. I was never not wearing a hat of some sort. It's hot in a way that people from Seattle don't understand.
12. The cruising community is probably the richest experience we took away with us. Forget the margarita's, dolphins in our bow wake and the brilliant sunset and stars. It's the people that we took with us when we got home.
13. The only reliable navigation data we found for Mexico's Sea of Cortez was Heather and Shawn's Sea of Cortez Cruising Guide. The charts you'll buy in a store were last surveyed in the early 1900's (some as early as 1896) and the digital charts we bought were based on those surveys. According to our chartplotter, we were anchored on land as often as not and we sailed over many an island. Waypoints from their cruising guide were the only thing we gave any credibility to that came out of our chartplotter. The rest was our eyeballs and our depth sounder.
14. We were told that the Sea of Cortez was "too cold and windy" to ever think about cruising there in the winter. Please tell everyone you know that this is TRUE. Then you will have all sorts of room in any anchorage you choose as you enjoy some of the most remote and amazing islands and topography.
15. As a corollary to #14, always have a plan B anchorage with solid protection from the north. From January to March, we got a norther every 7 to 10 days that pinned us down for a couple days.
16. Hand steering is fun now and again but self-steering is mandatory. Even just to step away from the helm to tend a sheet without rounding up or broaching. We are not well configured to have a wind vane so it's autopilot for us. And we like our autopilot almost as much as we like oxygen.
17. We skipped fishing/crabbing/prawning in BC last time because we did not want to pony up for the fishing licenses. We won't be making that mistake next time.
18. Set an anchor alarm that will wake you up. Friends of ours dragged anchor in a 35 knot blow and were woken up by the sound of their boat crashing on a reef. An hour later they had to drive the boat up on to the beach to keep it from sinking.
19. Pay attention. We watched a 120ft yacht happily drive right over the top of a reef that we can't get our dinghy over at low tide. They returned our shouts and hollers with a smile and a wave.
20. All sailors will happily throw their full force and weight behind opinions, rumour and innuendo disguised as unrefutable fact. Just because someone on the dock (or some guy with a blog) says you have to/absolutely cannot do something, doesn't make it truth. Run your boat how you need to run your boat.

The one other thing I learned while out cruising is that I want to go back. Soon. There's a thousand things that are wonderful about real life (hot showers, flush toilets, money, being able to afford nice restaurants, grocery shopping that doesn't take 8 hours) but none of it holds a candle to being out there on a boat with my wife.

fridge box design

(Boat nerd post. You've been warned...)

Since we're employed and functioning members of polite society, we only have weekends to really get anything done on this fridge project. And since all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, we keep scheduling our weekends with things that are more fun than building a fridge (like drinking wine and hanging with friends we haven't seen in ages). We should be done with this project sometime around Christmas. 2012.

I have been working on the design of the fridge box (click here for the plans I drew up for the fridge box). I don't really like fridge interiors that follow the curve of the hull. Ours was like that and it was *impossible* to have any sort of organization to the food as it all eventually ends up in a big pile. It felt like I was rumaging through a dumpster looking for something good to eat. So on the side of the fridge box next to the hull, we'll step the box down giving us a useful shelf. The lowest area of the fridge box, we are calling the "beer can well". It will be the depth of a can of beer, allowing us to pack the bottom of the fridge with cans. This guarantees we will always have something cold to drink, makes a flat space to load the rest of the food in the fridge onto and provides a sort of alcoholic holding plate to store negative BTU's between compressor cycles.



We also want to make sure that at the closest point to the hull, the box is at least six inches away. This should give us a good buffer of insulation so when the hull heats up from the sun, the compressor shouldn't have to work quite so hard. Most of the hull above the waterline will have between 8 and 10 inches of insulation protecting the fridge box.

At the floor of the box, I am going to put in epoxy-coated 1"x1" firring strips and then an epoxy coated piece of 1/2" marine ply. This will keep the insulation off the floor of the box in case any water does penetrate. There is a stanchion on deck that if it leaked, would leak into the fridge box. I'll probably provide a tiny drain hole into the bilge so water can't build up. All of the insulation will be encapsulated in overlapping sheets of builders plastic.

For insulation in the bottom of the box, I'll use 1" extruded polystyrene foam boards (XPS). Their R factor is a little lower at R5 but they are more resistant to water entry than other foams. Since I'm replacing a huge fridge box, I'll end up with around 13 inches of insulation at the bottom of the box so I'm not really concerned about R value for this insulation. I'm going to use XPS for the insulation against the hull since that's another area that's more likely to have water intrusion.

For insulation on the inboard walls, I'll only have about 4" of insulation to work with. I'm going to use polyisocyanurate there since it has a higher R value (R6.5). The downside to polyiso is that isn't as moisture resistant as polystyrene. However, it is lined on either side with aluminum foil. Once I cut the pieces, I'll epoxy coat the ends. Along with encapsulating it in 6mil builders plastic, that should keep the moisture out.

The existing fridge lids are just 2" of wood, held open by collapsible springs of death. When you have your head stuck way down in the box and accidentally touch one of the springs that hold the lids open, they come crashing down like Vlade Divac in the paint and 8lbs of solid wood lands squarely on the back of your head. Ask me how I know. We'll be replacing these evil contraptions with gas springs. I'm also going to add at least an inch of insulation to the bottom of the lids to give it a little better R factor.

In the end, we will have reduced our 11 cu.ft. fridge/freezer down to a well insulated 4 cu.ft. of fridge space and 0.6 cu.ft. of freezer space.


We got a rare sunny day that lit the hull enough to figure out where the waterline was. We marked it for posterity.


Our fridge box mockup including our highly specialized measuring equipment.