Residential refer in gasser?

[FloridaFitz]

Has anyone looked into or done a retrofit of a residential refer in an Allegro gas model? One objection DW has to buying a late model 35QBA is the rv refer....she hates them, having dealt with all the issues in our previous coaches. The 35QBA uses a small 2 door refer to begin with, but I assume a small residential unit of about the same size could be acquired. Surely there's room somewhere for a 2000w inverter and extra couple of batteries???

[Diesel-Lover]

I have wondered the same. Perhaps its the issue of all the vibrations affecting the compressor. I will tell ya that for 4 years I had a small residential refer in a E350 van and it did well, never an issue. The batteries did bite the dust every year and a half or so.

[paz]

I installed an 18 cu ft Samsung RF197 in our Allegro Bay last winter. The Samsung will run on a MSW inverter. You may need to replace your inverter or install a dedicated pure sine wave inverter just for the fridge with a different make.

The 18 cu ft Samsung only weighs about 20 lb more than our original 12 cu ft Norcold, but you could easily install a smaller, lighter fridge if size or weight is a problem. We had to go with a larger French door fridge because the fridge is located in the narrow hallway and there isn't enough room to open the wider doors on a 2-door, top freezer model.

Our Bay came equipped with two 6-volt house batteries and a 1000 watt MSW inverter, and the Samsung works fine with this set up. The MH alternator keeps the batteries charged while on the road, and the two batteries will run the fridge a couple of hours without the batteries going below 50% without the engine running or without being plugged into shore power. Obviously, we can't boondock, but that's fine with us. It's harder to add batteries to a gasser than it is to most diesels, but it may be possible if you want to boondock. A total of four should run the fridge all night if you don't have much else running on the inverter.

Check out our blog posts on the install.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

BTW, Brannon Hutcheson (256-668-0973) at Custom RV in Vina, AL (near Red Bay) does a lot of residential refrigerator installations. He usually does the bigger Tiffin DPs, but he could probably also do an Allegro if you didn't want to tackle it yourself.