The summer heat was now so intense that the air conditioner was barely keeping up, running for six hours straight one afternoon. I finally put up one of the white tarps from Marathon to shade the main cabin from the afternoon sun, and that was enough relief for the ac to turn off intermittently.
But the next day the ac turned off entirely, giving me an overpressure error code. This is bad! I hadn't cleaned the ac lines since Solomons, so that's on me. I restarted the unit and started checking the running pressures. I really like that the unit we bought has built in gauges. So the ac is trying to pull heat out of the boat, transferring it to the cooling water, but if the flow of water is constrained enough the compressor temperature rises too high, creating an overpressure of the coolant. Yup, that is what was happening.
The air conditioner is cooled with the same water the boat is floating in, so the gadget that strains the big chunks out before the water heads downstream to the pump and ac coils takes a lot of the load. It circulates about 500 gallons of water an hour, so even slightly iffy water still has a lot of stuff in it after 30 or 40 thousand gallons. Then more stuff grows on that. I cleaned the stainless steel strainer basket with an old toothbrush then used a toilet brush (love the dollar stores) to scrub out the interior of the strainer.
Even this was not enough so I started purging the air conditioner cooling line with my latest techniques. First I blast street water from the through hull all the way through the system for one complete cooling cycle. Then I reverse the short hose that attaches to the through hull and back wash the through hull valve itself, trying to blow out whatever might be in there or the clamshell shaped screen on the outside of the hull before the next cooling cycle starts. This has the great advantage of still having the air conditioner working while I'm cleaning it, especially if the cleaning session is unplanned.
This process works well, but the growth rate for summer water temperatures was so fast I now had to repeat it every 10-12 days. But at least now I could do it myself, and had it down to about 10 minutes labor with 30-40 minutes of waiting around (with the AC on) - not too bad. There's always something that needs to be done on a boat.
A couple days later a big front came through and it poured rain for a while, finally cooling things off. The next few days were wonderfully cool and clear, only slowly heating back up to the previous levels.
Sometimes unusual things were swept up onto the small beach at the foot of the breakwater/dock. This time it was a 3-4 foot snake which was having trouble finishing off the fish it had caught.
Early mornings were almost chilly for a few days. This made me start thinking about fall, and heading south before chilly became cold.
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