tbray
Advanced Member
Our new camper, 2024 Salem View, which we picked up back in October has a 12V Compressor Furrion Arctic refrigerator in it. When we took it out for a weekend test run, the fridge refused to cool below about 40 degrees. It also got extremely wet and there was about a 1/2 inch of the frost on the rear wall.
We took it back to our dealer and said it didn't cool properly. They ran the official Lippert test and said it worked fine, no problem found, and charged us for the evaluation since it didn't fail the test.
We took the camper out in December and headed south to Florida. The fridge immediately frosted up and it hovered between 45 and 40 degrees, with section of the door where the milk needed to be even warmer. The weather was cold enough that we had to run the furnace almost every night on the trip down so ambient temperature shouldn't have been an issue.
We were using one of those standard mechanical refrigerator thermometers and decided it could be the culprit - so I got one of the ThermoWorks accurate to within 1 degree remote thermometers and ran the little wires through the seals, this verified that the temperature was between 45 to 40 degrees.
I then bought 3 of those battery operated fans and placed them in various places to see if that would help.
After having to throw out most of the dairy and other products that spoiled, I ran several experiments, defrosting the fridge, drying it out, and so forth. I found that if I set the temperature to the coldest setting, the fridge never even got to 40 degrees - it frosted up in a couple of hours.
So I found some 1/16" foam weather stripping and put it around the door opening. The fridge still had frost on the back wall but it was now able to maintain a comfortable 32 to 36 degrees inside. The only problem was that the weather stripping didn't stick all that well to the door frame and I had to constantly fix it.
The camper is back at the dealer with the complaint that the refrigerator seals are bad but ... they only want to run the Lippert cool down test which really only tests the fridge down to 40 degrees and I know it passed that test back in October.
In looking at the manual, it recommends 40 degrees with a low of about 36 degrees. It does say in the specifications that it is rated to go down to 32 degrees. In my opinion, this isn't working as well as the old propane fridges.
For the record, the freezer drops to about -18 degrees, which is far colder than the -4 in the specifications.
So am I wrong to expect the fridge to stay below 40 degrees? Would a Norcold or Dometic do better? I have had bad luck trying to get other Lippert products to work reliably and this feels like it is going to be a similar issue.
Thanks for allowing me to whine.
We took it back to our dealer and said it didn't cool properly. They ran the official Lippert test and said it worked fine, no problem found, and charged us for the evaluation since it didn't fail the test.
We took the camper out in December and headed south to Florida. The fridge immediately frosted up and it hovered between 45 and 40 degrees, with section of the door where the milk needed to be even warmer. The weather was cold enough that we had to run the furnace almost every night on the trip down so ambient temperature shouldn't have been an issue.
We were using one of those standard mechanical refrigerator thermometers and decided it could be the culprit - so I got one of the ThermoWorks accurate to within 1 degree remote thermometers and ran the little wires through the seals, this verified that the temperature was between 45 to 40 degrees.
I then bought 3 of those battery operated fans and placed them in various places to see if that would help.
After having to throw out most of the dairy and other products that spoiled, I ran several experiments, defrosting the fridge, drying it out, and so forth. I found that if I set the temperature to the coldest setting, the fridge never even got to 40 degrees - it frosted up in a couple of hours.
So I found some 1/16" foam weather stripping and put it around the door opening. The fridge still had frost on the back wall but it was now able to maintain a comfortable 32 to 36 degrees inside. The only problem was that the weather stripping didn't stick all that well to the door frame and I had to constantly fix it.
The camper is back at the dealer with the complaint that the refrigerator seals are bad but ... they only want to run the Lippert cool down test which really only tests the fridge down to 40 degrees and I know it passed that test back in October.
In looking at the manual, it recommends 40 degrees with a low of about 36 degrees. It does say in the specifications that it is rated to go down to 32 degrees. In my opinion, this isn't working as well as the old propane fridges.
For the record, the freezer drops to about -18 degrees, which is far colder than the -4 in the specifications.
So am I wrong to expect the fridge to stay below 40 degrees? Would a Norcold or Dometic do better? I have had bad luck trying to get other Lippert products to work reliably and this feels like it is going to be a similar issue.
Thanks for allowing me to whine.