So that’s why we have a hairdryer on board……

First lets back up to when we still owned a house. .

We had a love hate relationship with many parts of our house, and we are glad to be done with it and all its parts. But particularly the refrigerator.

We had a lot of ups and downs with our fridge. It was too warm for many months, except for that one month where it decided to freeze everything, and sometimes it worked just fine. We used our fridge as an ‘ice-box’ many times, replacing frozen gallon jugs of water inside to keep the temperature reasonable. We eventually got a new fridge – and it was even FREE! Maine has this nifty implied warranty law – which basically means that something should work for a reasonable amount of time, and if it doesn’t, you get a new one free! Thanks Maine!

Then we bought Jelanea and the fridge worked fine the first night. Then on the trip up to Maine it was running a bit warm (43ish) all day. After a few days of it not going down we got some ice and put it in the freezer box and that brought the temp down and held it at a steady 39.

For awhile.

About a month later it started rising again. This time ice didn’t seem to help so we called in a professional to take a look. He hooked up all his gizmos and readers and told us that everything looked fine. He postulated that our batteries had gotten too low which causes the fridge to automatically shut off since it doesn’t have enough voltage.

The shore power had arrived the same morning he came to look, so it was working fine and by the time he left back down to a nice cold 39 degrees.

I’m still convinced service technicians have some secret remote control, because things just seem to start working once you’ve arranged for them to come out….

Now, about a month after that, and after spending a pretty penny provisioning for our upcoming week of living on the hook, the fridge was at 50 degrees after I filled it with new groceries.

At first I thought I maybe the temperature had risen while I filled it to the brim with the food I just bought. So I waited.

As a I waited it crept up to 51 degrees….then to 52 degrees. All the while it was running and closed.

Something else was wrong.

After looking at the coils I realized we had about a 1/2 inch of ice buildup on the entire ‘freezer’ component. Time for a defrost.

I emptied all the new (and old) groceries into our two coolers, packed them with the ice I could dig out of the freezer and opened the fridge all up.

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Then I was ready to wait for all the ice to melt – and wondering how long that would take – when I remembered that for some unknown reason we had our small hair-dryer on board!

With the hair-dryer in hand I got all the ice off the coils in about 15 minutes. There was a LOT of ice…..

Then I set to drying and cleaning the fridge – because what better time to clean then when its already opened and warmed?

And a mere hour after starting the project – the fridge is closed up and cooling down once again. Success!