did you add a fan to your refrigerator?

Bought a Valterra Fridge Fan which runs about 4-6 weeks on a pair of "D" cells. Makes a very noticable difference in cooling.

Personally I run the fridge @33, and that is with the cavity fan, so its a solid 33 everywhere. The freezer makes and keeps ice just fine, so I suspect ice cream would do fine.

Thats on a setting of 3-4.. :)

Thanks to all for your responses. I got out a ladder and checked behind the refrigerator. It is mounted in a slide so there is a top and bottom cover. The refrigerator is a 36 degrees while on the 3 setting. I don't have any idea without a thermometer of how cold the freezer is. Looking down the back side through the top vent hole I could see two fans that are there to move air up and out the top vent. They were not turning. I followed the wires down and found an inline fuse with a pink 4 fuse. I am assuming this is a 4 amp fuse. The fuse looks good so I don't know why the fans are not turning. When I turn the setting to for the refrigerator went from 36 to 35 in about ten minutes but the ice cream is still soft. I may have to call the guy....

I have a small compressor fridge that comes with a fan on the condenser. I modified it to blow air through, instead of pull air through, which made it more effective and quieter.

The way I designed the Airflow, this single fan also has no choice but to pull cooler air from down below the fridge, push it through condenser once across the compressor and compressor controller, and out a vent, so the cooling unit is not bathed in air it itself has preheated.

I've also installed a 40mm 0.03a ~6cfm fan which blows into the small freezer portion of my fridge box which takes power from the luight and runs 24/7. This keeps the internal temps much more even, and allows me to use a lower setting to hold lower temperatures.

Since the fan itself adds some heat loading that the cooling unit must remove it does not make use less electricity or lower duty cycle, but without it the back upper portion of the fridge goes to the mid 40's with the floor at the low 30's. on a setting of ~3.7 of 7. With the fan on, and a setting of ~2.2 of 7 the temp range is 33.5 to 35.5F.

Proper installation is key. Sounds like the RV installers of absorption fridges are more worried about getting it done, rather than doing it properly. The baffling to allow natural convection currents would require too much labor at the factory level. Adding fans pushing from the lower end seems to help some, but should not be required if the install accounted for promoting convection currents.

Computer fans vary widely in air moved for noise made and current consumed. Fans internal to the fridge need not move huge amounts of air. If they are powerful then the fan hub is adding work to the cooling unit. If I had an absorption fridge in a regular RV, I'd concentrate on baffling the condenser, and adding a snap switch controlled fan on the roof vent to suck air from the area behind the fridge when certain temps were exceeded.

I added a fan to the back of my refrigerator and found it helped when the outside temperature was over 90°F. I have a side vented refrigerator, and the spacing behind the refrigerator is critical. I found the biggest improvement came from making changes in the air movement using this this PDF I found at the Bryant RV site. Adding some baffles to correct the spacing made great improvement - freezer is below 0°F until the outside temperature goes over 100°F - my ice cream is hard!

i have been experiencing the same issues with my norcold. i like the smart fan and will install one before the season starts. THANK-YOU for the info. maybe i will love my fridge again if it keeps my snickers ice cream bars frozen....:)

HERE is the other currently running thread on fans.

There are several things to do. I just installed a three fan unit from Smart RV Products. It mounts up to the cooling fins and the three fans do a very good job of circulating the air around the inside of the refer. I did it to a Norcold 1200 four door unit, but they also have a similar fans for Dometic refers. I'm not sure why since the fan unit is in the refer portion of the fridge, but it also helped cool down the freezer. We were running 36 deg in the refer and 6 deg in the freezer. We were on the 3rds or 4th setting. Gotta keep that ice cream cold! And if you have any question, call Mike, he'll give you a hand.

Smart RV Prod clicky


Dometic coolers on Ebay clicky


You can also install fans in the top refer vent on top of your RV. I'm following the way that Executive did. I can't find his posting with pictures, but if he sees this he'll probably provide a link.

Bill

I guess our fridge hates us too....understand your frustration rk911!

I added one just to move the air. Frig works great. I added a toggle switch near the light switch and can shut it off if needed.