refg swap from RV style to home style
Has any one changed from RV refg to home style? What king of problems did you find? Did it work any better? Looking for better reliability.Thank You
Forum Discussion
Here's a write up I did in January on the Escapees site.
Well, our Norcold 1200 died in a flurry of the bad smell of ammonia, and not in flames like some do. We decided to switch to a residential unit and found one of the now hard to get Samsung RF197’s in Platinum Stainless at a fair price. As a side note the RF197 has been replaced by the RF18 which uses just a bit more power and is also a little taller. One of the reasons I picked the 197 was its minimal use of power at a grand total of 3.9 amps (468 watts) when both cooling evaporators and the “defrost” cycle are running. Most of the time it’s just the compressor and one evaporator demanding cooling and that only takes 130 watts or about 1 amp of 120VAC.
Deciding how to power the new unit was the next challenge. I communicated with Samsung tech support and they told me that they no longer recommended that the 197 could be powered by a modified sine wave (MSW) inverter. My options were to replace my whole house 1500W MSW unit with a new 2000W PSW one or add a second smaller unit just for the fridge. After some research and recommendations from Yarome and others on this site I went with a separate 600 Watt PSW unit from Samlex at a cost of $200. I had a hard time trying to locate the new inverter close to the battery bank due to the configuration of my coach. I wound up placing it in the closest available compartment at a distance of 10 feet that also was just underneath the refrigerator. We used AWG 0 wire for the run. The fuse is located near the battery bank.
The Install. We removed one of the windows on the patio side of the coach that measured 48” X 40”. We removed the Norcold and passed it out thru the window onto a hoist. The cabinet had to be modified for the new unit by lowering the cabinet floor by 7” and moving a few other things out of the way. We also fed the existing 120VAC outlet, in the back of the fridge cabinet, into the lower compartment and secured it near the new inverter. Once that was done we brought the new fridge in thru the window and placed it into position, hooked up the water for the ice maker and fed the plug down into the compartment below. In order to get it level we had to remove the front rollers and use shims for the final adjustment. The top of the fridge was secured using the old brackets from the Norcold that were relocated and re-bent. We fired up the new inverter and plugged in the new fridge and it all works great. I can leave the fridge plugged into the inverter all the time if I want, but what I do is plug it into the newly relocated 120VAC outlet. I’m kinda of like a manual transfer switch and may add an automatic one later on. We secure the doors for travel with Velcro.
The day after the install we headed to Lake Mead for a week of dry camping. We did not have any power problems all week. The new unit sips power. Our routine, starting in the evening, was to run the generator for about an hour while preparing dinner and watching TV. At 10PM I would shut down the whole house inverter and check the battery voltage. I would check the voltage again around 7 AM when I got up. Typically we would lose about 0.2 volts overnight. I would then start the generator and use the toaster, coffee pot and microwave and leave the genset running for an hour. At that point the bulk charging was done and I would let the solar finish the job during the day. We have 375 watts of solar, four 6 volt house batteries and a BlueSky 2000E charge controller. As a note we measured the power consumption on the whole house inverter, with no loads turned on, just stuff plugged in like TV’s, microwave etc. and found that it consumed 2.3 amps feeding the parasitic loads. On a typical overnight with it on the battery bank would go down by about 0.6 volts. I am very happy that I used a second inverter as it keeps my power drain at a minimum.
So far we are really happy with the new unit and have 12 cuft in the fridge and another 6 cuft of freezer space. BTW, it makes a lot of ice in a relatively short period of time.
Well, our Norcold 1200 died in a flurry of the bad smell of ammonia, and not in flames like some do. We decided to switch to a residential unit and found one of the now hard to get Samsung RF197’s in Platinum Stainless at a fair price. As a side note the RF197 has been replaced by the RF18 which uses just a bit more power and is also a little taller. One of the reasons I picked the 197 was its minimal use of power at a grand total of 3.9 amps (468 watts) when both cooling evaporators and the “defrost” cycle are running. Most of the time it’s just the compressor and one evaporator demanding cooling and that only takes 130 watts or about 1 amp of 120VAC.
Deciding how to power the new unit was the next challenge. I communicated with Samsung tech support and they told me that they no longer recommended that the 197 could be powered by a modified sine wave (MSW) inverter. My options were to replace my whole house 1500W MSW unit with a new 2000W PSW one or add a second smaller unit just for the fridge. After some research and recommendations from Yarome and others on this site I went with a separate 600 Watt PSW unit from Samlex at a cost of $200. I had a hard time trying to locate the new inverter close to the battery bank due to the configuration of my coach. I wound up placing it in the closest available compartment at a distance of 10 feet that also was just underneath the refrigerator. We used AWG 0 wire for the run. The fuse is located near the battery bank.
The Install. We removed one of the windows on the patio side of the coach that measured 48” X 40”. We removed the Norcold and passed it out thru the window onto a hoist. The cabinet had to be modified for the new unit by lowering the cabinet floor by 7” and moving a few other things out of the way. We also fed the existing 120VAC outlet, in the back of the fridge cabinet, into the lower compartment and secured it near the new inverter. Once that was done we brought the new fridge in thru the window and placed it into position, hooked up the water for the ice maker and fed the plug down into the compartment below. In order to get it level we had to remove the front rollers and use shims for the final adjustment. The top of the fridge was secured using the old brackets from the Norcold that were relocated and re-bent. We fired up the new inverter and plugged in the new fridge and it all works great. I can leave the fridge plugged into the inverter all the time if I want, but what I do is plug it into the newly relocated 120VAC outlet. I’m kinda of like a manual transfer switch and may add an automatic one later on. We secure the doors for travel with Velcro.
The day after the install we headed to Lake Mead for a week of dry camping. We did not have any power problems all week. The new unit sips power. Our routine, starting in the evening, was to run the generator for about an hour while preparing dinner and watching TV. At 10PM I would shut down the whole house inverter and check the battery voltage. I would check the voltage again around 7 AM when I got up. Typically we would lose about 0.2 volts overnight. I would then start the generator and use the toaster, coffee pot and microwave and leave the genset running for an hour. At that point the bulk charging was done and I would let the solar finish the job during the day. We have 375 watts of solar, four 6 volt house batteries and a BlueSky 2000E charge controller. As a note we measured the power consumption on the whole house inverter, with no loads turned on, just stuff plugged in like TV’s, microwave etc. and found that it consumed 2.3 amps feeding the parasitic loads. On a typical overnight with it on the battery bank would go down by about 0.6 volts. I am very happy that I used a second inverter as it keeps my power drain at a minimum.
So far we are really happy with the new unit and have 12 cuft in the fridge and another 6 cuft of freezer space. BTW, it makes a lot of ice in a relatively short period of time.
