The ones built in to the rooms are certainly not refrigerators. They are roughly comparable to those plug-in coolers you can buy in stores such as this:
Click HERE for a link to one at Target What you two saw being wheeled were the mini fridges being provided to those who have medical needs for one.
Now, that aside, the coolers should manage to make beverages cool
overnight from room tempertaure. They do not work like a normal refigerator in they do not run on a compressed gas and honestly do not have the cooling ability of a normal refigerator. They work on a 'heat pump' concept that requires a fraction of the electricity of a refigerator and still provide decent cooling.
A word of advice- anyone whose cooler will not keep beverages cool, or cool warm ones
overnight needs to report it to maintainance! It certainly won't fix itself. And it's not like maintaince has the time to check each and every cooler in al lthe cabins during the turnaround. They rely on
you the user of the device to report it as defective.
Now what I wrote is firsthand info. I talked to one of the maintainace people during one of our cruises and I'm an industrial maintaince mechanic, so my curiosity tends to run into the hardware anyhow
The other interesting fact is this: You'll be very hard pressed to find one item aboard ship: an incandesent bulb! You wont find ANY in your cabin. all the lighting in there an a large percentage aboard the ship is low voltage lighting. That's why the lights turn on and off strangely, they are runing on low voltage, as it's a lot easier to produce than 110v for everything. I wouldn't be surprised to find out the built in coolers are also low voltage, although I didn't ask then.
