4 November Unhappy fridge

Our hard working Nova Kool fridge has been showing signs of age. After 15 years of keeping the butter cold in the tropics it's struggling.

David checks for the fault as much as he can, but we have to call in the local Grenadian expert who helped with our freezer a couple of years ago, the mighty Tevin. He identifies we have lost coolant from the system which is likely to be a pin hole in the evaporator plate. To rectify this we buy a new plate from Wally World and loose the freezer / ice box to gain more space within the fridge and Tev fits it and recharges the system with R135 coolant. The end result is better cooling, less running than before, but not brilliant so I continue to research via the internet who might have a replacement in stock and how we get it shipped because, of course, there's not going to be one on island.

Nova Kool is made in Canada and the size we want is out of stock until January. The lead time and prohibitive shipping costs are not good as we are due to leave Grenada within the week to go cruising north. However, this does open up the opportunity to import into duty free St Martin in a couple of months and to explore alternative brands in the French islands. There's a possible solution waiting for us in Guadeloupe. For now we'll be going with Tevin's fix.

Tevin at work

removed for work