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Take
a look at any modern book on outfitting the perfect cruising powerboat,
chat up any marine manufacturer or designer, or just page through a mainstream
marine magazine these days, and you’ll shortly come up with a consensus:
Getting a marine air conditioner to run all night on a midrange cruiser
without firing up the genset or plugging into shorepower is an absolute
impossibility. Modern, production-type air conditioning units, despite
their hip coolness, simply draw too much power for even the most sophisticated
inverters to handle long-term, even when teamed up with large battery
banks.
Consensus,
conshmensus! Back in early June I spent an entire night babysitting a
Harley 42 Superstar performance-type sportyacht that, thanks to a custom-built,
highly engineered, extra-efficient, 6,000-Btu air conditioning unit onboard,
blew just about all the conventional thinking about marine A/C I’m
familiar with out of the water.
How?
Right off the top, the unit—the brainchild of Miamian Bert Kehren
and the handiwork of air conditioning guru Abraham Motro of Avi-Air Marine
A/C, also of Miami—is way more conventional than nouveau. It looks
like any number of modern production units of the same capacity, at least
to the untrained eye, and sports the same type of components—a compressor,
evaporator, condenser, water pump, and blower motor. The kicker, however,
is that most of these components are just a little more expensive, a little
better engineered, and considerably more efficient than the components
you ordinarily see on modern mainstream marine air conditioning machines.
While
the specific results of my Harley sleepover are pretty darn exciting and
indeed may change how cruising people air-condition their boats in the
future, understanding these results and their importance requires a little
background, starting with a story Kehren authored and sent to PMY early
this spring.
It
begins with Kehren’s retirement from the world of international corporate
management nine years ago, a move that allowed him to establish residence
on a canal in North Miami, install the Harley on a lift in his backyard,
and begin thinking about how he was really using his boat—or more
particularly, his boat’s genset. Eventually he realized that he was
operating it only periodically and seldom under much load, at least in
part because of his love of peace and quiet. The next step came logically
enough. Kehren wondered if there might be a way to downsize or even do
away with the genset and toss a battery bank and an inverter into the
mix by way of a replacement. The final step? Thanks to some knowledge
of electrical engineering, Kehren soon determined that the greatest single
power drain onboard the Harley was her oversized, 16,000-Btu air-conditioning
system, which drew 16 amps at 110 volts A.C. in cooling mode. “Obviously,”
he concluded, “if I was going to rethink my genset situation, I was
going to need a more efficient air-conditioner.”
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