Residential Fridge or Not?
the Wife and I are shopping and we see a lot of fivers with residential Fridges and Inverters in them now. Are they really more prone to breakdown because of the bouncing around in the trailer or it ...
Forum Discussion
I still have a Dometic but read all I can about residential. If I do get one I dont think using it in an RV is an issue. I dont drive fast on dirt roads, I usually crawl so I dont think I would be hammering it enough to hurt it. Maybe I'm wrong? My concern is mainly energy use. I have four 6 volts and 520 watts of solar. I dont think I would have a problem and might only have to run my Honda 3000 if there were a few bad days. I have had a couple people tell me that they had friends that had them and couldn't install on enough solar to keep up. Who knows what their install was like? Maybe they wired it with 16 gauge. Sounds like BS. It's just a matter of crunching the numbers for each model and figuring out their expected energy use is. My solar stuff is new so I'm not 100% in tune to how well it will do this winter. I have a Bogart 30 solar control and a Trimetric so I will be able to monitor it better this year.
You have to power an inverter which uses some power also so it wont run long on one group 29 battery, maybe 2 but who knows how much generator time you would have the next day. Then you get into the whole issue of how your converter performs. 13.6 volts wont get it at all.
I leave my house unheated all winter so it has to be winterized. The frig has always been the biggest pita. I use compressed air to blast the whole system out and it works well but I was always nervous about leaving residual water laying in a solenoid valve and damaging it.
At first I fabricated a 5 gallon air tank so that it could be filled with rv solvent and pressurized it to feed the appliances. It worked good on the dishwasher and the washing machine but it was difficult to purge the ice maker.
It worked ok for the first couple years but I messed up and cracked the valve bank for the ice maker. So we bought a new counter dept frig with all the gizmos. I now remove the water filter and complete ice maker valve bank. The valve is probably $150- $200. I then blow out the lines to the filter etc.
The pressure tank method wasted too much solvent so I started using a small drill motor driven pump connected directly to each appliance. It worked good for the dw and washing machine but I still didn't trust it with the new frig so I remove valves.
In theory if you put the time into cycling the ice maker you should be able to push solvent through it. I know the water filters work so good that they take the pink out. I would have to smell and look closely at the glass of water to know when the solvent was making it through.
My Dometic is 15 yrs old and as long as I keep researching this issue it should keep working. I do also have a couple large fire extinguishers. :R
You have to power an inverter which uses some power also so it wont run long on one group 29 battery, maybe 2 but who knows how much generator time you would have the next day. Then you get into the whole issue of how your converter performs. 13.6 volts wont get it at all.
I leave my house unheated all winter so it has to be winterized. The frig has always been the biggest pita. I use compressed air to blast the whole system out and it works well but I was always nervous about leaving residual water laying in a solenoid valve and damaging it.
At first I fabricated a 5 gallon air tank so that it could be filled with rv solvent and pressurized it to feed the appliances. It worked good on the dishwasher and the washing machine but it was difficult to purge the ice maker.
It worked ok for the first couple years but I messed up and cracked the valve bank for the ice maker. So we bought a new counter dept frig with all the gizmos. I now remove the water filter and complete ice maker valve bank. The valve is probably $150- $200. I then blow out the lines to the filter etc.
The pressure tank method wasted too much solvent so I started using a small drill motor driven pump connected directly to each appliance. It worked good for the dw and washing machine but I still didn't trust it with the new frig so I remove valves.
In theory if you put the time into cycling the ice maker you should be able to push solvent through it. I know the water filters work so good that they take the pink out. I would have to smell and look closely at the glass of water to know when the solvent was making it through.
My Dometic is 15 yrs old and as long as I keep researching this issue it should keep working. I do also have a couple large fire extinguishers. :R
