1200LRIM Norcold

[Dale Walker]

Hello fellow Beaver lovers. I had an incident that I can't explain. I took the coach down to have a new tail pipe installed, I put it back in the shop to finish getting ready to head out, and all the batteries were dead. I got it running by charging up the batteries on shore power. In the mean time, I realized we were not going to go, so put it back in the barn, to winterize it. I had flipped the master switches, when I parked it over a week ago. I went out and flipped the switches back on, and plugged it in to 110 to charge the batteries, and as I was walking back to the front of the coach, sparks and smoke started billowing out of the refrigerator vent. I went back, unplugged the 110, and shut off the master switches, opened the vent cover, and found the heating element wires had shorted. It has one yellow and one black wire going into it there is also another just like it in there too. How close did I come to burning her down? I also can't understand how there could have been power anyway, the refrigerator has been off, for 3 mos. Any ideas, or experiences would be helpful!

Thanks!

[Fred Brooks]

          Hi Dale,
   Inside your Norcold refer is the cooling unit. Inside the enclosed cooling unit is hydrogen and ammonia. The heating elements fit down into an area right above the burner area where there are welds that hold the tubing of the cooling unit together. These welds are constantly subjected to extreme temperature variations and will eventually fail. In the event of a failure, all you need is an ignition source and you have a high pressure blow torch! Ammonia is caustic and toxic and hydrogen is of course flammable.
  Some folks have installed a Halon fire extinguisher system in their refer compartment for safety reasons, others have replaced their refers with residential refrigerators after their RV refers have failed.
   My suggestion to folks with older coaches with an original refer is to unplug the 110 cord if they store their coach plugged in and make sure the refer is turned off when unattended.
   Hope this helps, Regards, Fred

[Joel Ashley]

Dale is wondering how the element's leads had power if the fridge wasn't on.  So am I.

I can only surmise the control board is faulty in allowing 12v. through to what I assume must be a relay, solenoid, or other type of 12v/110v switch.  It would seem unusual to have two unrelated faults at once here though... a control board one plus a short in the element's power supply wires.  Although I'm aware of multiple board-related recall issues with certain Norcolds, I'm not sure this was the issue.

I'm very curious as to what's ultimately behind this near-disaster.  Dale, can you offer more about the nature of the "short" you found and how the wires could've reached that point?

Joel

[Steve Huber]

Dale,
Consider replacing the reefer with a residential Samsung. We  (with Fred Brook's help) installed an 18 cu ft and after 2 months on the road, love it. Our extended warranty policy paid the cost of replacing the bad cooling unit in our Dometic and we applied that to the  Samsung purchase/install.
Steve

[Keith Moffett Co-Admin]

Dale
An option on the 07 Tunder was the residential frige package.  There is aparently enough call for it that they began including it.  In 07 the refrigerator technology was such that they added two extra large batteries for a total of 6 D4 12 volt batteries.  This system works well but today the Samsung and so on use less energy making the process cheaper and even more efficient.
If one were to look at buying new rv or residential and adding batteries (which may not be needed now) I still believe you would save over $1k.
Food for thought!

[Dale Walker]

Thank you gentlemen for your replies. I cannot explain how much this jarred my confidence! I'm sorry, I know everyone is installing the residential refrigerators, but I have never had any reason to question the reliability of the other 4 coach refrigerators I've owned, but this one shook me pretty good.
I have replaced the element today, it was installed inside a tube, beside another tube, that has an element just like the one that failed. The only other thing I can tell you, is there was a 5 amp fuse that was blown. I changed the element today, and the fuse, turned it on and the unit hums so there must be power to it. It was to late for me to do much with it, and I wanted be able to stand by it to see that everything is safe! The one thing I noticed when I took the other element out, it seemed like the wires had been twisted, could that have contributed to the short? I can't say, but when I reinstalled the new one, I was very careful to make sure they stayed parallel. Still doesn't explain, how power could have gotten to it when everything was supposed to be off.

Thanks again!