If you spend any time in an RV with a fridge … you’ve probably run into at least some kind of problem at some point.

With us … our fridge is the bane of our existence!   Sometimes I think there’s a demon living in it!demons in my fridge

Just recently we finally got our insurance company (thank goodness for that extended warranty we agonized over purchasing!) to replace the cooling unit on our Norcold fridge in our 5th wheel.  Over the 2 years we’ve had the RV we’ve lost the contents of the fridge and freezer a couple of times so it was a welcome fix.  The original Norcold Cooling unit was replaced with an Arctic Cold unit with a lifetime warranty.  Of course this doesn’t cover all the other things that can go wrong.

That was only 2 months ago.   Everything was fine until yesterday when we came home to find there was no lights or power in the fridge at all!  We checked fuses, circuits … checked that there was AC and DC going to the unit … all seemed fine but still the fridge was deader than the proverbial door nail!

A frantic call to our dealer who gave us some (obvious) things to try … Check all the fuses and the fuses on the converter, make sure there is AC power and DC power going to the unit (RV fridges require both) which we had already done but we did it all again anyway.  Next, since apparently RV Absorption Refrigeration units have a nasty tendency to get too hot and catch fire, there is a work-around device clipped to the cooling unit, called a ARP

ARP unit

ARP Unit

(Absortion Refrigeration Protection System) that will shut down the fridge if it gets too hot.  Once tripped this unit is technically not serviceable by the customer, you are supposed to get a RV Tech out.  Well since that isn’t always convenient or possible you can attempt it yourself.  My techy said these units are reset by passing a magnet over the device.  In reality you have to pass the magnet over the correct spot, which my techy didn’t know. (Click this link to find out how to do it in case you run into this – Resetting your ARP).  When this didn’t work he said we needed a bigger magnet, so off I went into the rain and wind storm that was raging at the time to source a bigger magnet.  Sadly that didn’t work either, and in hindsight, after doing some online research, we discovered that if the ARP device had triggered it should have showed up as an error message on the fridge display…good to know.  Anyway, I digress,  when that didn’t solve the problem we were told that no one could come out for service till Monday (this was Thursday night…no fridge all weekend, bummer!!).

We are fortunate that we have in-laws nearby with a fridge and freezer with a fairly large capacity … so in the worst rainstorm of the season … in gale force winds … in the dark …we were forced to haul the contents of our fridge over to their place.  Not happy ‘campers’!

elf with wandA quick look the next morning – hoping that the ‘fridge elf’ came in the night and waved his (or her?) magic wand to get the fridge going again – but no such luck!

We called around to all the mobile RV repair places in town, but couldn’t get anyone else to come out … I guess they’re just that busy!  Next stop … searching on-line to see if anyone else out there had the same problem and if there was an answer.

I found a great website:  http://ww2.justanswer.com/about-us

They apparently answer all sorts of questions with experts in just about every field.

inside fridge access panelThis is what we found:  Once you remove the access panel to the back of the fridge look for and find the power board, located under a black powerboardplastic cover.  So far so good, but then … how in the world do I access that? (it helps if you’re double-jointed and have hands the size of a small child with a screwdriver that bends around corners).  Once that was solved and the cover was removed, hallelujah, there is another 5 amp fuses on the power board!  Who knew?  (Certainly not our RV service department who  had failed to mention that to us!)  And yes, that fuse was indeed burnt out.  HOORAY!!  Once that tiny fuse was replaced we were back in business!

So … we avoided an expensive service call and learned something in the process!  Only worrisome thing is, we don’t know what caused that fuse to burn out in the first place, but hopefully this was an isolated incident.

We’re good to go till the fridge demon awakens again!

Well … now onto fixing the leaking input hose on the hot water tank we thankfully discovered while fixing the fridge, I guess there is some good to everything, right?