Spring Cleaning (almost!)

It’s not quite spring but we decided to clean behind the fridge anyway.  The fridge hasn’t been moved since it was installed back in 2012 and as you know it works on the principle of extracting the heat from inside and expelling it via a radiator on the back.  If the radiator gets clogged up with dust then the fridge has to work harder.  That means the domestic batteries work harder. 

The first step was to turn off the 12V to the fridge and remove the contents.  I then “jiggled” the fridge out and turned it 90° so Jan could have access to the back and the now empty compartment.

Hummmm Some dust on the top!

We started the boat engine and then Jan set to work under supervision with the vacuum cleaner.

I had anticipated more dust inside the compartment.  The top pipes are the hot and cold to the toilet and shower.  The big one is the toilet return and the two lower pipes are for the central heating finrads.

The ”breathing holes I drilled at the rear allow cold air to be drawn from the bilge in an effort to keep the fridge radiator cool.  The idea is this improves efficiency and reduces the 12V demand.

If you look closely at this next photo you can see all the airborne dust I created when I decided to ”help”.   This is why I should never help with housework! 

The next small task was to check the phone internet allowance.  You may recall I wrote 18 days ago that we only had 429Mb left of our monthly 12000Mb allowance.  To prevent us from running out of data I turned off the mobile phone ‘hotspot’ and instead connected it to the Zoom router via a USB cable.  This stopped us from using our tethering (hotspot) data allowance and switched us over to the phone unlimited data allowance. 

I checked the hotspot data allowance 3 days ago and it was still on the original 429Mb.

So using the Zoom router connected to the phone gives us unlimited data.  Whilst this might seem great we did notice using this setup did result in some “drop-outs”.  So the Zoom setup didn’t appear to be as reliable as the phone hotspot.