Lwiddis wrote:
"Atwood has stopped making original part, as it contained mercury, and offers no alternatives"
This is not unusual for old RV appliances with or without mercury. What stinks about Atwood's customer support if they told you promptly that a replacement was not available? That's a sales/profit decision, not a customer support problem. I seriously doubt you talked to the person(s) who decided to discontinue that item.
The decision was NOT ATTWOODs "fault", you can thank all the tree huggers and "NIMBYs" (AKA Not In My Back Yard) for that.
No company in their right mind would ever attempt to design, make, market and sell a replacement part for an very old DISCONTINUED appliance or device.
Companies typically will only carry "replacement" parts for TEN YEARS after manufacturing of that model has ceased or when SUPPLIES of the leftover (NOS or New Old Stock) parts have been used up.
OP has a 16 yr old appliance, Attwood has no legal attachment to that appliance to provide any parts, new, used, refurbed or some sort of substitute.
Attwood simply cannot accept any liabilities for such an old appliance.. And I would not ever ask a company to go that far out on a limb.
The mercury thing caused a lot of manufacturers to do the same thing and even created such a shortage of RV ovens that many RV manufacturers were not able to find enough Stove/ovens and had to switch to combo microwave/convection oven for a few years.
Bashing Attwood or any appliance manufacturer is not right, it wasn't their faults, it was faulty environmental laws..
