Cold Chain Calculator

Keeping fresh catch cold from the moment it's landed until it hits the dock is the difference between a sellable product and a spoiled one, and this calculator sizes the two main tools for doing that: ice and mechanical refrigeration. Ice needed starts from a roughly 1:1 ice-to-fish ratio for the first 24 hours of a trip, adding half that ratio for each additional day (icing loses effectiveness over time as ice melts and needs topping up), then scales that base figure by a temperature-adjustment factor — the wider the gap between ambient temperature and your target storage temperature, the more ice it takes to hold that gap, with the model never going below a 1x multiplier even when ambient and target temps are close. Ice cost simply applies a flat $0.10-per-kilogram flake-ice price to that total.

Refrigeration capacity, in BTU/hr, comes from a basic heat-load calculation: catch weight (converted to pounds) times fish's approximate specific heat of 0.8 BTU per pound per degree Fahrenheit, times the temperature delta (converted from Celsius to Fahrenheit), divided by the trip's total hours — essentially, how much heat needs to be removed per hour to hold the catch at target temperature over the whole trip. Hold volume is a packing rule of thumb: about 1.5 cubic feet of insulated hold space for every 30 kg of combined fish-plus-ice weight. All of these are planning-stage estimates built on generic constants (ice ratios, specific heat, packing density) rather than your specific vessel's hold insulation, species mix, or ice quality, so use them to size equipment and provisioning, not as a guarantee of exact ice consumption on any given trip.