Plate Freezer Hydraulics - Forums Archive

curmudgeon

2014-03-04 05:11:55

I'm not sure how many of the freezer-boats in out fleet are powering the compressor off of a hydraulic pump driven by the main engine? That's the way ours was. In a two week trip we'd put over 350-hours on the main. And with fuel prices the past couple years than make me gasp I decided it was time to see if we couldn't shoe-horn some kind of little auxiliary into the engine-room to at least give the main a rest while we were at anchor. The pictures attached are one man's madness on "how to do it."

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The folks at Integrated Marine Systems suggested I talk to MER in Seattle.

Tyler Allen the Marine Engineer at MER was super helpful at suggesting the proper hydraulic pump, providing the mounts and flywheel flex-plate, and exhaust system components and heat-blankets. Couldn't have done it without him!

Since the point was for the Isuzu to just keep the system going at night, it works just perfectly. A little 12-horse engine wouldn't be enough to pull the system down from ambient, but after the main does the heavy-lifting the Isuzu can take over easily. Quieter, smoother, cheaper. Nice!

JKD

2014-03-04 08:26:44

Very nice and a great idea for giving both the main engine and your wallet a break. Back in the late 70s I ran a tender with one of those MER Isuzu 7.5 kW plants onboard and I was impressed with how smoothly and quietly it operated. In three seasons of use our only repair job was replacing the original injectors and a soft [freeze] plug in the block

Trnaround

2014-03-05 13:33:14

You do nice work Curmudgeon. Can you still generate electricity as well or is it a dedicated hydraulic pump?

Kelper

2014-03-05 16:02:18

Thanks for posting. I love seeing project pics.

curmudgeon

2014-03-05 18:00:32

We discussed running the hydraulics off a PTO from the front of the Isuzu, but that end of the crankshaft can't handle extracting more than about 4 horsepower, which was way too little for the Freezer compressor. (you could do both if you had a gen-set with output of 15 to 20-KW or more. MER makes these really cool PTOs). So we just removed the Stamford AC generator and put the hydraulic pump on the flywheel end. I added an 80-amp alternator on the other end (which is about as much as you can run off a single v-belt set-up), and we have a 3-KW Magnum inverter-charger, (and we replaced the sodium lights and basically everything else with LEDs), so there's plenty of 12-volt DC and 120-volt AC now, even at anchor, and the 120-amp alternator on the main-engine takes over in the daytime.

Trnaround

2014-03-05 18:37:53

That's a good system. Did you have to increase your battery capacity?

curmudgeon

2014-03-05 20:37:39

Lots of batteries were already there... Four 8-Ds and a Group-27.

I try to keep one dedicated to engine starting. So there are several disconnect switches.

The only thing I had to change was the fuse for the inverter (there used to be a 1,200 watt inverter and it had a 100-amp fuse) the new inverter needed a 250-amp fuse. And I added a disconnect switch to the Isuzu 12-volt system.

You can see from the pictures that there a couple full sized fluorescent fixtures in the engine room plus four large LED arrays. So the E/R is nice and bright and I love that!