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Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1997 07:54:29 CDT
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         hgmueller@HYDRO.MB.CA
Subject:      Re: Westfalia Fridge

Hi Scott, having just come back from the maiden voyage with my 85 Westy I can report that the fridge (and stove) worked perfectly on 12V and propane. No noise, propane made ice cubes every day and moves between campsites at 12V kept the fridge adwquately cold. BTW, my fridge doesn't seem to work on 120V and given the way it works in the other modes I'm not even going to try to fix it.

Harry ------------- Original Text

========================================================================= Date: Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com> From: Scott Semyan <scottse@MICROSOFT.COM>, on 7/22/97 5:40 PM: Subject:

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


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