Well, we are *FINALLY* making some progress after battling the temps in our refrigerator over the last 3-4 very *hot* weeks. We’ve finally figured out the problem!

Since we were having temperatures that were fluctuating everywhere, we made the guess that the thermistor might be bad. As I understand, that’s a common occurrence, so we started looking for some replacements.

The challenge is that the thermistor goes from the inside of your refrigerator to the circuit board outside with a reaaaally long cable. The idea of having to remove and replace that didn’t sound really awesome, I’ll tell ya.

We searched a little and found this cool option (pun intended) to replace just the refrigerator portion of the cable!

You get an adjustable RV thermostat in your refrigerator that can be manually modified to help the adjustment. This worked well on our Dometic Refrigerator (we have the Dometic DM2852 model).

A little bit of stripping and crimping later, we got this working. Weird thing, though – I thought our “Level 1-5” reading on the refrigerator would not do anything with this thermistor. Apparently that’s not *quite* the case. I haven’t really modified this thermistor much but now that it’s pretty cold I regularly reduce the refrigerator setting to 4. Ah well, another option to play with when we have issues in the summer again.

Just to be clear, my issue was related to the thermistor going bad. Even a good thermistor won’t fully help your problems with the ambient temp is closer to the 100 degree mark. These things were just not meant to hand that kind of heat consistently.

Interestingly enough, we never had a problem with our freezer thawing… I’m not complaining, though…

So, we’ll go through what we do to keep our fridge cool when its super super hot out :

1. Increased insulation around our refrigerator to help with improved air flow
2. Put out our awning to shade the refrigerator during especially hot days
3. Used a battery-operated fan in the refrigerator to improve air flow (we only use this when its hot since it goes through D batteries like crazy)
4. Kept the refrigerator setting at the highest cold setting possible
5. Keep items in the refrigerator away from the sides to help with improved air flow (having bins sometimes helps this)
6. Purchased a backup refrigerator/freezer in case we’re getting into uncomfortable temps and the fridge just isn’t hacking it.

Because I didn’t want to be caught with our pants down if our refrigerator did decide to take a siesta, we purchased a combination freezer/refrigerator as a backup plan. I originally was looking at the Dometic dual zone refrigerator as a possible solution (there are 75L and 95L dual zone options) but the cost of this slapped me in the face pretty quickly (it was nearly $1400 for the 75L version).

I chose to gamble a bit and try an alternate solution from Alpicool. I liked this one since it was a little smaller – 50 L and it fit reasonably well in front of the fireplace when we were using it in the summer. We used it continually for about 6 months and have been happy with it. And it was less than 1/3 of the price of the Dometic!

We have used it in the camper when we were running the furnace, and there was no issue – it’s lower than the fireplace vent so you can have both running happily. I did like this place as well since I could use the 12V adapter which was above the fireplace.

Now that it’s in the winter, I’m temporarily storing it in the back of our truck until we need it again. Right now, we aren’t needing it (we can get everything nicely into the refrigerator). But we’ll keep this in the truck – I’d rather have it than not. With Murphy’s law, you *KNOW* my fridge would have issues when I didn’t have it!

We were toying with adding a 110V outlet on the side of the camper so we could keep this on one of our “flank sides” on the flatbed. We’ve used it as a beer/pop cooler also so that mini outdoor kitchen might be an idea in the future. 🙂