What to do Refrigerator, Norcold N821RT

corvettekent wrote:
My Norcold was not working either so I went on U tube and fixed it myself.

I just replaced the refrigeration unit on our nocold 811. Used a rebuilt unit, easy job. Ours was a leaker right on bottom of boiler. My unit including freight & new heater was $465 . PPL has new ones 1150.

Thanks to all that replied.

John

My Norcold was not working either so I went on U tube and fixed it myself.

John,

If it can't be repaired, then I'd replace it.

I'm not a fan of a residential type refrigerator in an RV that you want to be reliably self contained for off the grid camping - the electrical system to support use of it is too involved to afford, install, and keep an eye on. Keep your life simple and just replace your propane refrigerator with another one.

What CAN be done versus what SHOULD be done sometimes takes a lot of thought about the subtle pros and cons.

X2 on the above although I added a switch to turn the defrost off and I turn the icemaker off if Boondocking for more than a couple days. This gets me down to less than 100 AH in 24 hours...two batteries for a 21 cuft refrigerator.

There are pros and cons to resi or propane. If you are usually plugged obviously it's easy to run a resi without other modifications. If you plug in at home to cool down and then travel to a campground and plug in again it works. The next level of using a resi would be to run it on an inverter. You then get into sizing an inverter and probably at least two GC2 batteries or comparable. This would be a minimum set up that takes you beyond having to go from 120 plug to 120 plug. It isn't a full boondocking set up, it's just enough that you could do a night at walmart or something instead of having to plug in right away. It would surely need two 6 volt batteries and wouldn't necessarily let you use a lot of furnace or television. The next level would be four 6 volts which gives you about 420 ah with 200 or so usable.

I started out with a 40" led television, any amount of furnace use and laptop, led lights etc and I did it on four GC2 and 520 watts of solar with generator back up. When I installed my Whirlpool resi I added 480 watts of solar and 2 more GC2 batteries. It does defrost cycles at times which iirc pulls 25 or so amps dc for 10 min or so and it probably averages 100 ah or so of energy per day. I wouldn't go back to propane. $1500 propane or $360 for four gc2, $485 frig, $700 solar bank. Nothing rv is one size fits all so you need to do an evaluation of your camping style and comfort level.

I'd add solar and go to a residential fridge.