people with frig cooling troubles read

[midnightsadie]

for the last couple weeks I,ve been fighting a frig that just would not cool , did everything,I though.short story , check how tight your frig door closes. mine looked good till I realy looked. put a bungee cord across the door temp went from 42deg to 36 in four hours. gasket looks great door might be a little twisted, give it a try.

[Handbasket]

Yep, tight door closure makes a difference. A few comments:

There's a section in my little (2354?) Dometic's on-line manual on using small wads of fiberglass insulation to force the gasket out to close better. You roll the stuff into four tight balls, and insert it into the gasket at all four corners. Leave it for a few hours (IIRC), then take it out. I tried it with marginal results.

I called Dometic about a replacement gasket. After 1/2 day of futzing about, I found that the best I could do was to pay them $142 + ~$10 tax + $25 flat rate shipping.... this would buy me a gasket with the right cross section but too large. I could then cut it down and splice it back together to fit.

For now, I'm using a 3rd alternative... a yellow plastic tree-felling / wood-bucking wedge, about $7 from Northern Tool. It's intended to hold the cut open to keep the wood from binding the chainsaw's bar. But I'm using it to hold the door tightly shut. My fridge door swings open right over the carpet, so this works for me. I just put the wedge on the floor under the door on the side away from the hinges and give it a gentle push. It's holding good temps now. Have to wait 'til high summer to see how well it really works. If your door is up off the floor, maybe this will inspire you to invent some alternative.

Jim, "Meter maids eat their young."

[j-d]

Outstanding advice. We thought our Norcold N811 had given up on us summer before last. Turned out that our door flexes. I can "spring" it so the corner below the latch hits a half inch or so before the catch corner, and the gasket seal is still loose down there. So now our fridge door closing procedure includes a knee to that corner. Sometimes we push the freezer door corner above its latch.
Then on this Forum (maybe in Tech Issues) Doug explained that Norcold turns the cooling off every day and a half or so in a "defrost" attempt. That little cycle is far better at warming the fridge than it is clearing the fins, trust me. We now shut the Norcold off for about 10 seconds at lunch every day. It never gets to the "defrost" and stays much colder. Doug didn't sound like Dometic does that, but the thread was specifically about Norcold.
Also put a couple little 12V computer fans on the coils but I think the first two items were the most helpful. Our "dying" fridge has worked two years and with the way it acts it'll probably run two more.

[Cobra21]

Great find! Another way to test the door gasket is to close a dollar
bill in the door, then pull the dollar out. Do this all the way around the door, you should feel resistance with every pull.
Brian