Okay, this thread is hopelessly long, so I figured few would read it all. Kudos to you for your patience;). As for which element to run, I think moving the hot spot away from the place where the boiler cracks, and then evenly distributing the heat to the rest of the pocket would be more important than total watts. I also believe this was Dometic's reasoning in redesigning these elements. If you look at the picture above, you can see the heated portion of the element does not extend all the way to the bottom like it did before.
As for why they didn't replace the elements as part of the recall.......who knows? Perhaps Dometic is more concerned about liability and maybe isn't too terribly concerned about the longevity of the existing refers (just a guess) -OR- Perhaps they figured the stress patterns were already set, and changing the elements now wouldn't matter (just more speculation). Regardless of their reasoning on the older units, I'd be willing to bet they're concerned about the longevity of the new refers they're manufacturing now.
For those of us with the older refers (with original elements), it may be too late to reverse the existing stress patterns, but I'd still feel much better knowing I had the latest element (I'd consider the $40 cheap insurance). BTW, I stock about 10 or more of these elements and try to sell one to almost every customer I run into with a recall refer. Needless to say, I sell a lot of them. Tim
