Adler-Barbour refrigerator Engines and Such Forums

hmm.. ours sat for about 5 to 8 years without running as far as I'm aware and since my wifes family bought ours it has run continuously for the last 7 years. I think its an adler barbour... it has a danfoss compressor and a itty bitty freezer box that is the cooling element for the fridge. I don't think it has been serviced to my knowledge in the last 14 years.

Not long after we bought the boat from her family I I did notice that the fan on the compressor/heat exchanger wasn't wired in correctly and had not been running. I plugged the power for the fan to the correct connection on the compressor and that has helped 🙂 still it ran good even before that. I think it is a bit more efficient with the fan running though.

fuel level..

On our boat there is a sender unit that mounts in the top of the fuel tank a couple inches from the aft edge. this is wired to a gauge on the cockpit instrument panel that is on the port side of the foot well beside the steering wheel. You should be able to access the aft end of the fuel tank by moving the bottom steps of the companionway out of the way to check the sender there. Manually you can unscrew the sender and use a dip stick to check the level. However it is really hard to determine how much is in there as the tank's shape is very odd. It has a rectangular shape about 12 to 14 inches deep in the bottom that sits in the upper bilge area. It then Y's out at the top till the outer edges are under the galley and chart table cabinetry just a bit. Most of the capacity is in this upper area and the top one inch probably has 4 times as much fuel in it as the inch thick slice just 6 inches deeper. Hope this makes sense as I'm trying to describe it.

inverter puts out 120volts and fridge runs on 12volts? unless yours is one of those that can run on either 🙂 if it is 12 volts only it will not do it any good to supply 120 volts as in "oh shit..!!! is that smoke!@!! back there" lol.

with a good shore charger floating the batteries and providing 12 volt power to the rest of the boat you can leave it running and it wont hurt the batteries.. unless the shore power goes off 🙂 Ours has been running that way for 9 or 10 years... 4 group 31batteries in absence of shore power and any other electrical draw seem to be able to run ours for 3 or 4 days in the summer before we are 50% discharged. your milage may vary depending on how yours is insulated and other factors.

sounds right to me.. batteries run the fridge and charger keep the batteries topped off at the same time.

I don't turn other currents drawing stuff off but I do run the batteries down to 75% every once in a while and then charge them back up... well I did... since I installed the solar it kinda just takes care of itself. Only once in a while does it drop below 80% if we are using a lot of amps. Solar generally brings it back to 100 percent the next day. Just mounted a 200 watt panel yesterday in addition to the 325 watts already installed. Once I hook it up I hope to have enough power to not only run all of our 12v and 120 volt stuff but have some left over to heat water.

So far we have had the solar running for 104 days and produced 8831.9 Ah  or 115 kWh. The only time I have had to turn the shore power on is if we have more than 2 days of no sun at all. I think in the last 3 and 1/2 months that has accounted for about 5 times I have topped the batteries with shore power. With the new solar panel I think it will be even less than that.

Scott