DWilson296 wrote:
"This is not a safety issue, so it is not subject to NHTSA recall regs."
I'm not sure I understand your statement regarding a "safety issue." The envelope I received from Dometic explaining the recall is clearly marked in large red letters on the outside "SAFETY RECALL NOTICE" and includes language that it is mandated by the NHTSA. Please explain.
The way I see it,
there are two very distinct problems here:FIRST, there is the
risk of fire if the boiler tube springs a leak
while operating on gas. Fire is a safety issue because people can be seriously injured or killed, although there are no known fatalities as yet.
Dometic has chosen to respond to this safety issue by issuing the recall and installing baffles so that when the boiler tube cracks, the flammable coolant mixture will not come in contact with the gas flame. No contact, no fire. Presumably, the baffles will effectively eliminate the risk of fire.
It is understandable that the risk of fire is low (reportedly 0.01%, or about 1 in 10,000) because of the nature of the failure. The boiler tube leaks because of a too-hot out-of-spec electrical heating element which overstresses the boiler tube. It catches fire
only if the fridge is operating on gas
at the moment the leak occurs. It stands to reason that most of the leaks will occur while operating on electric, because it is the electrical heating element which overstresses the tube. If figures to fail on gas only if it has been worked to the very edge of failure by the electrical element.
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SECOND, there is the
risk of a premature failure of the refrigerator without fire. Premature failure of the refrigerator without fire is not a safety issue. (Expensive, but not safety related.)
From all reports, Dometic will do nothing to correct this problem.
The root of both problems is the defective electrical heating element. There are almost a million of them out there. The Dometic spec for the electrical element is 325 watts. The affected units have electrical elements that are closer to 400 watts. This concentrated heat overstresses the boiler tube at a weld.
I see nothing to suggest that the risk of
this failure is low. After a sufficient number of cycles, the boiler tube
will fail where it is overstressed. Although I have no comprehensive statistics, the anecdotal evidence shows that this failure is very common. Ask your own local dealer how many of these he has seen. Extrapolate that number to the rest of the country. I suspect that there have already been tens of thousands of these failures. Left uncorrected, I expect there will be hundreds of thousands of these early failures.
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What bugs me is that it would cost Dometic maybe an extra $15 per unit to largely solve the second problem also by replacing the defective electrical heating element with one that meets Dometic’s own specifications. This could be done as part of the recall for only the cost of the replacement element; the additional labor would be negligible.
Instead, Dometic figures to reap a bonanza selling replacement cooling units/refrigerators in a couple of years when the recall has run its course and hundreds of thousands of refrigerators fail without fire because the owners are still using the out-of-spec electrical elements which are the root cause of the problem.
I believe that Dometic is at fault here because for so many years they installed almost a million defective heating elements when it would have taken but a few seconds to test the elements (or a sample of the elements) with an ohmmeter. Dometic either failed to perform this simple quality test or they chose to accept the defective elements from their supplier.
Wayne
