Norcold Refrigerator Rescue

Hi All! I have owned several motorhomes over the last 30 years, all with their share of problems of one kind or another. In the past several months I've followed post after post about the failures, fires and recall fixes on the Norcold refrigerators. This has been of major concern for me and my family as we love to travel in our motorhome and up until recently have felt reasonably safe while traveling. With all the concern about fires and patch job recall fixes on the Norcold fridges, I decided to order one of the Amish Built Cooling Units and do the conversion myself.

Now please understand, Im no spring chicken, but I do like to try to do as much maintenance on my Winnebago Journey as possible, so I figured I would try and tackle the job myself. I ordered the unit on a Monday and picked it up the following week. By that time I had already pulled the fridge out and had it laying on the floor of my coach. I took my time over a period of several days (just wanted to do it right the first time) and also make a few modifications.

Along the way I took pictures of the work and made a short slideshow video to post on "YouTube" so that maybe others could learn from my conversion.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgjDl5nwPMo

I now have an excellent working refrigerator that has been holding a temperature of 34 degrees for the last week on a setting of #4 with an outside temperature of 90 degrees. The installation of the SS-30 Halon Remote Fire Extinguisher is an added bonus in that me and my wife and little doggie can now sleep comfortably without one eye open worrying about a potential fire.

Thanks
1Sammiedog

1Sammiedog,

This whole fire concern has put a real damper on my excited search to find a buy my perfect first class A rig.
As you say, I bet I would be sleeping with one eye open and never be able to relax.

What is the bottom line? Are these refrigerators really rolling "hydrogen bombs" or will regular maintenance and inspection take care of everything?

And how does the Amish upgrade take care of the potential problems?

The ARP  RV fridge add on is an improved control system for the adsorption fridge.  I am not the expert on this, but it is or was a sponsor of this site and is highly respected  by many here.

Great video. Thanks. )

breezie said:

1Sammiedog,

This whole fire concern has put a real damper on my excited search to find a buy my perfect first class A rig.
As you say, I bet I would be sleeping with one eye open and never be able to relax.

What is the bottom line? Are these refrigerators really rolling "hydrogen bombs" or will regular maintenance and inspection take care of everything?

And how does the Amish upgrade take care of the potential problems?

Click to expand...

Nothing is a given. The Amish units are reported to have significantly more robust construction. I swapped mine out 2years ago with an Amish Helium unit and it performs as good or better than my OEM ever did in temps from 40 to 115 with no change in internal temps. And since this is an inert gas, the chance of fire is close to zero.
I also have an ARP installed along with one of the two Halon extinguishers I had on the OEM unit