The GRIDCOOLER keel cooler is a heat exchanger of the outboard or hull type. The GRIDCOOLER keel cooler eliminates sand and silt deposits in engine jackets, and protects your engine from corrosion and deposits in salt water operation.

The unique design of the GRIDCOOLER keel cooler eliminates the objections associated with keel cooling - such as bulkiness, drag, fouling, and weight. In many cases, a GRIDCOOLER unit requires only one twentieth of the space needed for channel cooling.

LOW DRAG - Independent tests run at the Vienna Model Test Basin have shown that additional drag is negligible or almost nonexistent when GRIDCOOLER units are recessed in a ship's hull. On our high speed test boats, we found that the difference between rolling and brushing regular antifoulant hull paint on the hull of the boats created more drag than our GRIDCOOLER keel cooler.

PRESSURE DROP - Because the pressure drop over the GRIDCOOLER unit is extremely low, it does not restrict the flow of jacket water, making possible the use of a centrifugal circulating pump, as well as displacement types.

EASILY INSTALLED - The design of the GRIDCOOLER keel cooler presents no greater problem than ordinary through - hull fittings. The GRIDCOOLER unit eliminates the seawater pump, strainer, scoop, and seacock (except for wet type exhaust systems, which usually require a small capacity pump). The GRIDCOOLER keel cooler is a completely assembled unit ready for installation, complete with heavy neoprene gaskets for sealing the inside and outside of the hull.

VARIETY - GRIDCOOLER keel coolers are available in over 20,000 models to meet your operating conditions and the engine manufacturer's exact cooling requirements for your engine.

FERNSTRUM BOX COOLERS

A box cooler, like our GRIDCOOLER keel cooler, is a cooling unit that operates below the water line. Unlike the GRIDCOOLER keel cooler, the box cooler is placed in a sea chest instead of outside of the hull in a recess or flush mounted to the hull. This gives the box cooler a greater amount of protection, and allows us greater flexibility in sizing one or multiple units for your specific needs. For example, rather than changing only the length of the tubes, or the number of tubes the cooler uses in width, we can stack the tubes that are used in a box cooler. While we currently offer GRIDCOOLER keel coolers that are two tubes deep, the BOX COOLER can be two, ten, fourteen or more tubes deep as well as any number in between. The main drawback to box coolers is space. Because they are placed in a sea chest, space must be set aside within the hull for the sea chest, unlike our GRIDCOOLER keel coolers, which need only space outside of the hull (unless they are recessed).