Sharing this here because it may benefit more than just those in the TT or 5'er or MH sections. Might be a bit long winded but it's what I went thru.
A few months ago I got back into occasional weekend rv'g by picking up a small Starcraft Avalon 17 and some number model. It had a small Dometic fridge. During walkthru fridge wasn't cold, it can't be in that short amount of time. The freezer had a cool tot he touch feel which is what you'd expect after only being on 20 minutes after sitting in a 100 degree parking lot.
fast forward...first time I use it was a few weeks later in camp driveway. Turned the fridge on and tossed a few waters and Dr. Pepper's in it. It did fine.
A few weekends later, my grandson came over and we stayed a night in it just for fun. he loved it. Fridge was fine.
A few more weeks, me and him went on a one night trip. It didn't do as well, but our site was in direct sun, no shade and it was terrible hot out. So I figured that's all it was, as the fridge was on but not doing as good as it could.
A few more weekends later, me and him went on a two night trip. This time it was obvious the fridge was sick.
This brings me to my most recent trip. I knew it wasn't at its best so I started messing with it a week before time to go. And it just wouldn't do hardly anything. I read about moving the thermister higher up on the fins and tried that. Nothing. Also all the pics I saw showed it on the right sde of the fins. Mines on the left, so I worked as much slack inside as I could and got it to the right side. I also added two very big pc fans in the back. It seemed to do better but the next morning it was only 70 in the fridge.
So then i went digging online. After a few days I eventually found a Dometic service manual that covers alot of models. Very nice find. Also I dug into how one of these things works. They run on ammonia and a little of a few other things in there. The heater boils the ammonia and at that pint the stuff separates in a cooler and that freezes the ammonia and makes it super cold and the process starts over. Not the exact correct but the basic idea.
These things are basically a very capable sub zero freezer. You can get some serious cold tempos out of them. Which brings us to the control. An important part of that is the thermister. it doesn't tell it to turn on, it tell it to tun off. And in the maunual I found, digging deep into how it works, if you remove the thermister it put the unit in a runaway mode. It will never stop freezing.
Yesterday about 6 pm I fired it all back up, but removed the thermnister. In less than an hour the freezer was down to about 26 or 28, but the fridge was only down to about 70. At 10 pm, the freezer was about 20 and th fridge was about 42.
This morning the freezer was at 1 and the fridge was at 20. At this point I turned it all off.
So, I'm it going to drab it 100 miles and leave it a month for the dealer to make a mess of it, I'm going to order an aftermarket thermister, the one where they advertise that you don't have to remove the wires, just snit them and drop this one in place.
So, some very impressive results from a little fridge that you normally would think it's really not that capable of making it very cold.
Hope that wasn't too bad of a ramble.
https://www.ebay.com/i/272301434403?chn=ps
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