Sometimes we have no idea what we’re doing. Okay, maybe more often than not. This situation was no different. Thankfully there are videos out there to help out RV owners like us!
(May 2021 Update at the bottom!)
It all started one unsuspecting Wednesday evening while we were dry camping outside of Las Vegas. Out of nowhere the lights on our fridge start blinking. On RV fridges, blinking lights are always a code for something. We’ve never seen both lights on our fridge blink at the same time (except when we run out of propane) so I proceeded to search the web for our fridge’s owner’s manual.
On our particular model, the Norcold 611 series, the two lights shown below would blink five times every three seconds. This meant that for some reason the fridge wasn’t cooling properly or not cooling at all. The first thing to check for when your RV refrigerator isn’t cooling is an ammonia leak. Open the back panel on your fridge (on the outside of your RV) and look all around for any leaks. If you do find one, call your local RV repair center. You’ll probably have to replace your refrigerator. We didn’t notice a leak, so the next afternoon we packed everything up and drove into Affordable RV (we called ahead and made an appointment). The technician did a bit of troubleshooting, suggested we check our batteries, reset our fridge, and sent us on our way. Problem solved! Not so fast…
Later that day the fridge lights start blinking again. Shoot. Did I mention we were also expecting company? We did not want to cancel on our new friends (by this point our refrigerator is not cooling at all) so we head back into town to pick up a couple coolers and bags of ice. That evening we had our friends over, enjoyed some great conversations and good food, and resigned ourselves to troubleshooting our fridge again the next day.
The first thing we did Friday morning was head into town yet again and buy new batteries. We got those put in and crossed our fingers that that had fixed our problem and all was well again. Nope. Four hours later the lights start blinking again. Back to YouTube to see what we can troubleshoot. Is it working on electric and not propane? What about on propane and not electric? Or neither? We checked the thermistor using a multimeter. Thermistor seemed to be working. Let’s just turn fridge off for the night.
Saturday morning we put the thermistor back in the fridge and pull the fuse to the fridge to reset it. We turn the fridge back on auto and it seems to be cooling now! Woohoo!
However, it still isn’t cooling to the point it should be so we go back to troubleshooting. We opened the back panel of the fridge and cleaned it out with a can of compressed air. We checked for a proper flame in the propane burner, which looked fine, but we ultimately decided to clean out the burner assembly anyway (it really didn’t look that bad but who knows?). We then reassembled everything and turned the fridge back on. Since then our refrigerator has been working as it should, but we still don’t know if we actually fixed it or not.
Problems with RV refrigerators are common and there are a handful of good, step-by-step videos out there to walk a person through how to troubleshoot and fix them, which is why I didn’t go through that here. If you have any questions, though, please feel free to email us or drop us a comment below. We’d love to hear from you! And you can always find us on Facebook and Pinterest @simplejoyfuljourney. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom of the page if you haven’t already. Have a great week!
May 2021 Update:
We were having issues with our fridge again while camping near Quartzite, AZ. We called a mobile RV tech who helped us replace our circuit board. That didn’t fix it, so we disassembled our burner assembly again and took it to a nearby RV repair shop to have it cleaned out, before resorting to replacing that as well.
Giving the burner assembly a good clean was exactly what it needed and the refrigerator has been working great since then!
One thought on “Our RV Fridge Quit Working!”
I smell amonia