Marine Air Conditioning

A marine A/C system is nothing like a house unit. It has to move heat with seawater instead of outside air, survive constant salt exposure, run on 120/240 V shore power, a genset, or 12/24v systems to cool a huge fiberglass box that's often getting direct sun on every side. When any one piece of that chain goes wrong — a fouled condenser coil, a weak seawater pump, a stuck reversing valve, a slow refrigerant leak, a failed control board — the whole boat becomes unlivable within an hour. Our job is to diagnose and fix it fast, on the boat, without pulling the vessel or booking a shop slot two weeks out.

We service self-contained units (the small under-berth or under-settee boxes typical on 25–50 ft boats), split gas systems (compressor/condenser below, air handlers throughout the vessel), and full chilled-water plants (a central chiller feeding fan-coil units in every cabin, standard on 60 ft-plus yachts). Every one of those architectures has its own failure signature, and Daniel has 15+ years running each of them across sportfish, motoryachts, catamarans, and cruisers in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.

Common calls: 'my A/C won't cool anymore,' 'the compressor keeps tripping the breaker,' 'the seawater flow alarm keeps going off,' 'there's water in the bilge under the air handler,' 'ice is building up on the copper lines,' 'the display reads HPF or LPF and shuts down.' Every one of those is a real diagnostic path — not a guess-and-replace exercise. We arrive with gauges, a leak detector, a vacuum pump, a recovery machine, R-410A and R-134a on the truck, and a stock of the pumps, capacitors, contactors, sensors, and control boards that break most often on Dometic, Cruisair, Mabru, Webasto, MarinAire, and Frigomar equipment.

New installations are a specialty. Repowering a 40-year-old Cruisair split system with a modern Dometic or Mabru variable-speed unit typically drops the amp draw by 30–50%, cuts noise dramatically, and adds real heat capability for the two weeks a year South Florida actually needs it. We handle the load calc, the ducting layout, the through-hull and pump sizing, the wiring, the commissioning, and the follow-up service — one vendor, one point of accountability.

Every service call is a flat $240 that covers the first hour of on-site diagnostic and travel from Boynton Beach to Ft. Lauderdale. Outside that range is $60 per half hour of travel. No shop drop-off, no haul-out, no waiting on the yard's schedule — we come to your dock.