Re - frigerated

Why, I can't help but ponder, is it a "refrigerator"? Surely something must be frigerated before it can be refrigerated?

Well anyway, our frigerator hasn't been frigerating for quite a while necessitating the use of a noisy, inefficient and rather small cool box and yesterday the time had come to do something about it

Just getting the fridge box and mechanicals out from under the saloon settee proved to be a bit of a challenge but eventually I could see what was what

And what I discovered was that the compressor and cooling coil had been mounted on a plywood structure attached to the side of the fridge box and that the new gubbins as supplied on a metal base plate wouldn't fit in the available space

One option was to remove the divider between the fridge compartment and the next storage space (already half the size it would have originally been) to make more room at the cost of space to store other things. The alternative was to remove the new compressor and cooling coil from the  base plate and mount them on the plywood as per the original setup

At the risk of causing terminal damage out of warranty, I went for the latter option. Much careful bending of pipes and drilling of new mounting holes etc later and the job was done

The next mission was to replace the original flat evaporator plate with the new oval one. Because of that size of the pipe couplings this meant drilling out the hole where the cooling pipe exits to fridge box. The thermostat fitted neatly in place of the old unit without modification

All that remained to be done before reinstalling the unit was to fill the oversize hole around the cooling pipe and the gap in the box insulation that had been cut out (and never filled) to accommodate the thermostat with expanding foam

Reinstalling the assembly was a lot easier than getting out out! Then it was simply a case of connect up the 12v supply and, offering a prayer to any passing gods who might be listening, turning it on

And happy days, we were re-frigerated!