Date:         Sun, 23 Mar 2014 17:50:05 -0500
Reply-To:     mcneely4@COX.NET
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Dave Mcneely <mcneely4@COX.NET>
Subject:      refrigerator question
In-Reply-To:  <hAbP1n00J08X5Fr01AbRiw>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

On our recent trip to Big Bend National Park, the Dometic refrigerator misbehaved.  I typically run it on battery on the road, propane in camp or for stops of even fifteen or twenty minutes.  Going down and in the park it was quite cold at night, and terribly dusty as we traversed West Texas from Oklahoma.  The back roads in the park were also dusty, but mostly a plume behind us.

The refrigerator did not cool well during the daytime on battery driving the back roads in the park, and I switched to propane against my own prohibition on having the propane on while driving.  Worked fine.  The last day we hiked, we got back to the van to find that the refrigerator had stopped working on propane, and the food inside was warm, but not yet spoiled.  I could not restart it.  So, we worked it out and moved the stuff that would spoil most readily to the beer and meat ice box, where we had block ice frozen at home in jugs still cooling well with half the ice still there after six days (cold nights, remember).  The days were quite warm (not by Big Bend spring standards, but in the seventies and even eighties).  I tried several times to restart the refrigerator, no luck, despite plenty of propane available.   I tried again a couple of times on the drive home, and again today.  No go.  It will not relight.

Time to pull out the refrigerator and clean it up?  Did the dust we drove through contribute to this failure?  We did not have dust inside the van, but I suppose it could get into the refrigerator through the flu.

mcneely