Date:         Tue, 22 Jul 1997 18:40:05 -0700
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Bob Bellanca <bajatrvlr@ABAC.COM>
Subject:      Re: Westfalia Fridge

Scott,
Do yourself a favor...Unless you're going to be parked somewhere for
several days, forget the AC and DC (matter of fact, forget the DC
altogether). This little fridge uses next to no propane, if it's not
over-driven. By that I mean,at night before you go to sleep, set the
thermostat to the coldest setting. In the morning, back the thermostat off
till you hear a click. That's the coldest it will ever get at the ambient
air temp you're in. Now, make a mark at that spot, so's you can return it
there when ever you need to. You can go over that mark, however, the only
thing you'll be doing is wasting propane.

The noise you're hearing is the fan in the back of the unit. It comes on
when the cooling fins reach about 135 deg. I changed mine to a small muffin
fan. No noise.

The least time I've gotten out of my propane tank (in 90deg weather) is 3
weeks. The most, 6 weeks (75-80 deg weather). That's cooking and everything.

Good Luck,
 Bob Bellanca
`81 Diesel Rabbit
`82 Diesel Westy (soon to be 1.9L turbo, I hope)
`84 Turbo-Diesel Jetta

At 05:40 PM 7/22/97 -0700, Scott Semyan wrote:
>Hello all. I have a newly acquired '85 Westfalia with the original
>Dometic fridge (in good condition) that I have a couple of questions
>about.
>
>Question #1:This fridge seems to take forever to get cold. Is this
>right? Here are my observations:
>
>AC - (while plugged into the house) it took 2 hours for the fins to even
>feel slightly cool. Didn't wait to see if it would get colder.
>Propane - Got it lit no problem (I can see blue flame through the little
>peep hole in the bottom of the fridge). I ran it for an hour and the
>fins were nice and cold but there was a loud buzzing noise (question
>#2).
>DC - ran it while cruising down the highway for an hour without the fins
>feeling cool at all.
>
>The woman at my local RV place (Evergreen RV in Seattle, the local
>authorized repair shop for the Dometic brand fridge) said that this is
>all expected behavior!? She also said the 12V operation is only to
>"maintain" the current temp and will not actually "cool" the
>fridge.Therefore a scenario (as far as I can tell) for this fridge would
>be to cool it overnight using AC, run DC while you are driving to your
>campsite to maintain the cold, and run propane while you are camping
>away from an AC source. So much for spontaneity. If this is the case,
>most likely I will resort to using a block of ice in the thing.
>
>Question #2: When running off of propane, I lit the stove, hung out for
>5 min or so to make sure my van wasn't going to blow up, then left. When
>I came back an hour later, the fridge was cold but it was making a loud
>buzzing/humming noise. Definately too loud to sleep through. I turned
>the propane off and a few minutes later the buzzing stopped. I restarted
>the fridge no problem and in the few minutes I waited, no buzzing.
>Anyone have any idea what is going on here?
>
>Scott Semyan
>'85 Westie
>