Since my Dometic Fridge failed in April 2005 in my 2002 Sunnybrook 5W, long before any of this recall stuff came to light, I have been checking this discussion thread from time to time. Most of the comments are about heating element watts, thermal fuses, etc., etc. Dometic has clearly tried to guide blame in the direction of wattage of the electric heating element, when the ACTUAL CAUSE OF FAILURE LIES IN DOMETIC'S WELDING METALLURGY AND WELDING PROCESS CONTROL.
My boiler tube weld failed at a weld that had nothing to do with the electric heating element housing weld. It was another weld close to the bottom, near the gas flame area.
Recall hadn't occurred yet, but I was just barely under the 3 year warranty, so thought it would be covered. Wrong! Catch 22 in the warranty requires proof of annual inspection/service by a qualified technician. Which I didn't have. But I still fail to understand how a yearly inspection could have prevented a weld from cracking?? This is really a DEFECT in materials and workmanship.
I called RV repair places, etc. and got the usual "it can't be repaired but we'll sell you a new fridge". Then I went online and did some looking around and found a couple of places where you could buy a rebuilt cooling unit for $400-$500. One was in Tucson, AZ, and I was in Phoenix. I also found on the Internet complete instructions on how to replace the cooling unit yourself. I pulled my fridge out, removed the defective cooling unit and went down to Tucson and exchanged it for a rebuilt/recharged one, guaranteed to cool. It was $457 plus fuel to Tucson and back. Intalled it in a few hours and was back up and running. Has been working great ever since, over 2 years now, and we're fulltimers, so its full time use. I even run it on solar power a few hours a day off the inverter. And we switch back and forth from gas to electric practically daily. It's not rocket science. The average do it yourselfer can do it.
Only problem is that the rebuilt cooling unit is another Dometic, so some other weld will probably fail in a year or two.
Bottom Line: DOMETIC HAS A MATERIALS, WORKMANSHIP AND PROCESS QUALITY CONTROL PROBLEM, BUT SHAMEFULLY WON'T FESS UP TO IT AND DO THE RIGHT THING. They just want to laugh all the way to the bank with the RVer's money.
