Like so many others, my 1200LRIM is pretty marginal (and by that I mean insufficient) in the hot summer days. I've toyed with replacing it, but especially since we don't full-time, that seems like an expensive option for now (and to be honest, I have other upgrades I would rather spend money on. Air leveling is something I really want).
On previous trips we've bought ice and used that to try and cool things, but it's never worked all that well. But then I got to thinking that perhaps I was depending too much on convection to move the air around. So I came up with a plan.
For this last trip, I bought a 5" portable "desk fan" that took 2 D cells.
I pre-froze 18 500ml bottles of water.
The night before at home, I fired up the Norcold. The first thing I did in the morning (which was about 3 hours before we were going to go) I went out with six of the frozen bottles of water and the fan, and set the fan face-down on the top shelf of the fridge and put the ice bottles beneath it, so the fan would be blowing right across them.
By the time we loaded up it was 38 degrees in the fridge. I took the six bottles and tossed them up in the freezer of the Norcold and then pack six new frozen bottles, our food, and then fit in a couple of extra bottles here and there, with the fan blowing through ice right down onto out dairy and meat products (which are really the most critical, in my mind).
The rest of the trip I would just swap ice bottles about once a day, and change batteries in the fan about every 36 hours. Even in 95 degree heat and the sun beating on the fridge side of the coach, I was able to keep it in the very low 30 degree range the entire trip.
I suspect others had probably figured out that airflow was super critical if you are using ice to help cool things, but I had never realized HOW critical (and no, this doesn't mean the Norcold doesn't suck
). And obviously this doesn't mean you can have rock-hard ice cream, etc. But for folks like us that are far from full time, for the first time, i felt I had control of the temperature of the fridge (and the freezer could re-freeze the bottles faster than I needed them). And for the cost of an hour's labor at an RV shop, I can buy 3 or 4 years of D-cell batteries, easy.
So for us and the way we camp (and the number of days a year we camp), I'm sticking with my solution until the Norcold dies.
I figured I'd post this in case it helps someone else that is in the same bind save some money for now...
Steve
Linear Mode
