Regarding some complaints about absorption RV refrigerators:
- "Need to be level when camped." We want to be level, anyway, in camp for walking around inside the coach and for sleeping .... so we always level our RV.
- "Don't cool well in hot weather." Our Norcold propane refrigerator has a slider switch on the front with five coldness settings. We just use switch position 4 or 5 in hot weather and it does just fine. We normally have to use only switch position 3 to keep the fresh food section at 36-38 degrees, and the freezer section at around 10 degrees. Maybe not all RV propane refrigerators have a coldness-setting switch? (The Dometic propane refrigerator in our friends RV doesn't ... for instance.)
FWIW, I recently installed a wall mounted digital indoor/outdoor temperature instrument in our RV back by the bed so we can see the coach interior air temperature back there. It also reads outside temperature via radio link to an outside mounted battery powered sensor. Instead of mounting this outside sensor outside the RV, I instead velcro'd this sensor inside the refrigerator, and now we can see interior temperature of the refrigerator by just glancing at the "Outside" reading on the face of the temperature instrument's panel. This works like champ to help us know when or if we have to change the coldness control switch on the refrigerator in hot weather.
Above all we need flexibility in our RV and it's propane refrigerator offers this ... dry camping or hookup camping it just sits there doing it's thing either sipping propane or automatically switching over to 120V AC ... no huge battery bank, or inverter, or solar, or sun, required.
I'll bet that propane refrigerators are getting the cheap-out treatment by RV manufacturers in that they don't install them with the proper ventilation such that they don't cool correctly ... just like they're cheap-out installing built-in generators poorly such that they're too loud to use.
