MacGregorSailors.com

Hi All!

For those interested in a very COMPACT PORTABLE BATTERY OPERATED AIR CONDITIONING SYSTEM for your boat here is a new offering that may fit with your desires!

https://www.zerobreeze.com/

What a neat option to have and versatile enough to have multiple applications too!
Light weight!
Small & Compact!
Battery Powered!

Use it in your boat! It’s BATTERY POWERED!!!
Integral battery pack and option to connect to auxiliary battery, house battery or shore power!

Use it in your tent when camping or at the beach! (Especially nice for those with babies, toddlers and young families!)
Use it in your car when car camping! (No need to run engine for Air Conditioning)
Use it in your RV when camping off grid! (No need to run a generator or deplete your house battery!)

If I wasn’t already set up with our current Air Conditioning system and generator arrangement this is definitely something we would have considered for Over Easy!

Worth taking a look at!

Best Regards,
Over Easy

Im definitely interested in your review!

Have looked at this a few times... 25 to 40ft2 of cooling. Its low btu 2400 but.. it could be placed outside the cabin for waste heat to be expelled outside the boat thus increasing efficiency.

What is the sq ft equivalent of our boat? Its almost impossible to give an exact answer but we could do some math to figure outnvolume...but zerobreeze doesnt have an easily seen reference to the volume it can cool.


So whos gonna buy one .. post a review...and send it back so i dont have to do math.

I don’t quesrion its efficiency in a very small room, but I do when it comes to our Mac’s.

Our boats are not very well insulated. The outside heat is just brutally, constantly baking on the hull. If you have a blue Mac, I imagine it’s worse. It may help reduce humidity though. We were driven from our M a few years ago when the humidity at a marina was just too much. We headed to the nearest hotel for the night. When we got home, I bought a small window air conditioner to place in the companionway.

A very ambitious product. I hope it does well.

Things I would be concerned about on a boat:

-As Niceaft alluded to, lack of insulation would challenge the ability of the unit to cool to a comfortable temperature. Like any device that uses electricity to cool or heat the air, it will drawn down the batteries significantly. Hard to say how many hours you could run it and whether even a large solar panel could replenish the batteries during the day.

-Managing drainage of the unit could be a challenge. The manual states: "The machine should be kept level when it is in use. It is best to lean it backward 5-10 degrees, not forward or left or right, otherwise the condensate water will leak from the front, side, and bottom of the air conditioner." The unit can store about 1-2 hours worth of condensate, so overnight use would require the use of the drainage line.

In trying to imagine how this would be workable on a boat, I am thinking it would be good to leave it in the cockpit so it could drain through the self-bailing tube. There is an extension (accessory) that provides a short extension at the cold air exhaust, so one could just connect ducting to that (preferably insulated) to make that possible. I can't see using it during waking hours unless the cockpit is closed up tight, and even then it's hard to imagine it being very effective due to lack of insulation. What I think might work would be to have a heavy blanket as a partition between the aft berth and the rest of the cabin. The interior liner would provide a modest amount of insulation, and the drying of the air would be helpful with overall comfort. Also, the hum of the unit in the cockpit above could (maybe?) help lull you to sleep. Don't know just how noisy it might be.

I'll wait until the come out with the fusion-powered model that is the size of a toaster and can cool the boat in 25 minutes and run for weeks on a banana peel.

Interesting.

Only a few mixed reviews on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Breeze-2300 ... B096N7JDS2

Russ wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2024 5:04 am Interesting.

Only a few mixed reviews on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Breeze-2300 ... B096N7JDS2

I actually laughed out loud at this review statement…

“You don’t believe me, go ahead buy one and join the hundreds of prostrated costumers complaining about this POS.”

My bizarre mind is picturing hundreds of prostrate customers, and their (muffled) complaints…. a vast field filled with barely audible, angry mumbling…

I wish amazon would tell yoy how many sold... was it 5? Or 5000? And only the disgruntled people leave bad reviews. A lot of amazon products havefake reviews to boost ratings which i doubt zerobreeze can afford.

I addressed this in an earlier thread with the goal of approximately 4 hours of AC run time. Points relevant to this this thread follow.

These are rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations but where they are wrong they are all wrong in the same direction. You may experience slightly better performance but you probably won't see worse.

The Zero Breeze is designed to cool <40 sq feet and will use 840Wh to run 4 hours. As reference, if you exclude the V berth and the rear berth you are looking at around 40 Sq feet. It costs about 10 times as much as a small window unit that is actually large enough to cool the cabin. On the plus side, it is small and does not block any of the companionway.

To recharge you will need something that can put 840Wh back into the batteries. Even allowing for 100% efficiency that would require around 200W of solar dedicated just to charging the batteries for the AC.

Seems Kmclemore opinion has followers



I think it,s up for more debate tho




A discussion between like minded may open up some brighter

Just sayin thats all
J

Just sayin’ … when the humidity is up and the temps are high even a few degrees drop and a bit less humidity feel REAL nice!
So while there are no perfect answers there are valid options out there to be explored.

Duration of anything battery operated depends upon the capacity of the battery or batteries involved as we all know.
Best if one runs auxiliary items off of an isolated house battery arrangement keeping the start battery protected.

These currently available nice lithium portable power stations have a lot of different capacity sizes, come with a plug-in 115VAC charger and generally have a reasonably capable inverter output(s) along with USB outlet(s). One of the bigger ones might be able to drive one (or more) portable A/C unit(s) nearly all night independent of the boat’s system.

There are various solar array charging options available as well to allow for recharging of the power station pack independently from hooking into the outboard engine generator output. That could allow one to replenishment during the day when out traveling.

As a baseline the little portable A/C unit(s) could provide a nice break from the heat and humidity for a nice bit of time.

We went through the modification to install a single hose portable A/C stand up unit in Over Easy.
While plugged into shore power it does a great job of dehumidifying and cooling the cabin area …. (At times it’s been more than too cold!).
For when we get to traveling further afield and overnighting on the hook we have a small Honda 2200 watt generator we can sling under the aft seat or place up on one of the benches on a section of isolation foam to dampen the vibration noise somewhat. So we get cool and comfortable with a modicum of noise… good thing we use the fwd berth and dinette area for sleeping. (It would be a bit noisier if one were to be using the aft berth with the generator above oneself.)

While our arrangement works for us in a slip or on the hook for the foreseeable future this little portable A/C unit does hold some promise.
With retrospect and deeper pockets we might have taken a different approach and considered this type of portable A/C system.
It’s lighter, quieter, more compact and inherently provides more lateral use options for different situations/applications.

The A/C sticker price should be weighed in conjunction with the ease/simplicity or installation/operation. Especially if one is only looking at an occasional night out on the hook. When back in a slip or back on the trailer recharging the battery (or batteries) wouldn’t be much of a task for most. It depends on what one wants to do, how much effort one wants to expend to do it and how deep one’s pockets are.

For me anyway as a design engineer and project manager I’ve never found a perfect answer, but only various good options to make a balanced choice from.

Best Regards
Over Easy

PS: The portability aspect of an A/C unit with an integral battery really would have been nice in our younger years with puppies, pregnancies, newborns and toddlers during road trips and sightseeing. That way one would have had the option of cooling down for several hours without idling the car and slowly watching it overheat and having to shut it off. Would have been much nicer and, for me anyway, it would have been worth every penny!

I want to start by saying I have nearly 40 years of experience as a consumer of air conditioning and electricity which in my mind makes me pretty cool.

Now the rest of the story...

I take my 2005 out on day trips in the Chesapeake here on the East Coast, and have a wife and a now two year old. I have explored beat the heat solutions and the current solution that works best is an IcyBreeze with backup cooler loaded with ice. In retrospect and as a future project, I would go with a Frankencooler (either self built or from his plans) for more efficient use of the ice.

These work for keeping 1-3 people cooler, or to cool down when blowing directly on you for 3-6 hours of boating mid-day. Neither IcyBreeze nor FrankenCooler, can in any way beat the uninsulated hull of my boat with the sun beating down on the hull to change the temperature of the cabin. But they WILL cool off a few occupants.

OverEasy wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 4:18 pm We went through the modification to install a single hose portable A/C stand up unit in Over Easy.

...
we have a small Honda 2200 watt generator we can sling under the aft seat or place up on one of the benches on a section of isolation foam to dampen the vibration noise somewhat.

This would be my next "upgrade" solution if I can come up with the capitol and the courage to strap these things in while heeling at 20 degrees with river spray.

As for the battery operated a/c? I believe it will function in my use case similarly to my current solution. I would bring a second battery and charge at home. Which is why I did not buy it when I first read about it a couple years back.

Hi All!

One of the recurrent comments is that the sun on the uninsulsted top deck heats the cabin (quite effectively from personal experience!)
We whole heartily agree!

There is a relatively easy solution that we’ve utilized during the heat of the day which is to stretch a sheet or tarp out over the top deck suspended by the stanchions, life lines, bow rail and Bimini.
Any shade is good shade and it makes a difference!

We’ve used both a tarp and a king size white bedsheet.
Between the two the bedsheet seemed to work slightly better and take o whole lot less space to store.
It’s also easier it clip in place too!
Dries fast too!

Just a suggestion….

Best Regards,
Over Easy

Hi All!

The product referenced below appears to be a modern take on the ubiquitous southern “swamp” cooler.

For those wanting an Air Conditioning option at the other end of the spectrum here is a modern product take on the ice block cooler

https://punovo.com/products/best-portab ... 3gcTxoC6Es

Stylish, remote control, sorta affordable, sorta low power consumption, sorta somewhat rechargeable, eco sorta friendly and sorta ready to use.

The product referenced above appears to be a modern take on the ubiquitous southern “swamp” cooler. I must admit that while working my why through school in the hot East Texas summers in an un-air-conditioned room I made a similar type of device from a pair of rain gutter sections, a slotted section of sheet, a fan and an aquarium pump to circulate the water from the bottom gutter to the top gutter which I had loaded with ice cubes (when I could get them).

The shredded sheet was lipped into the top gutter and held in place by clothes pins, the sheet wicked the cold water down, the fan blew through the shredded sheet, the excess water collected in the lower gutter, the collected excess water was then pumped back up to the top gutter by the aquarium pump to repeat the cycle.

Using water only it could drop the ambient air temp in the room by 5 to 8 degrees F.
Adding ice to the top gutter could drop the ambient air temp in the room by 8 to 12 degrees F.
Now that may not seem like much but when the outside air temp is measured in three digits on a regular basis even a few degrees is appreciated!

Best Regards,
Over Easy

Here another low tech option for cooling off… at least for a small localized area…





Best Regards,
Over Easy