GoodRVfood

Keeping Your Refrigerator Cool

Cathy Lea

Almost everyone with a small electric or gas powered refrigerator in their RV knows how hard it can be to keep a constant temperature throughout the daily cycle of outside temperatures. The most common warning I have heard is against over-filling the inside so the cooling fins at the back are not blocked. But I did not know that an empty refrigerator also has trouble maintaining a temperature. I wondered if the mass of the things inside are part of keeping the cool. So I bought a small bag of crushed ice from the campground office and filled lots of little quart-sized zip top bags enough to fill the freezer around the things I already had in there. The result was dramatic. The refrigerator remained comfortably below 40F (the danger zone) even when the outside temperature went over 90F at the hottest part of the day. And amazing to me, the temperature also did not fall below 31F at night. I know, because I have an alarm on my refrigerator that used to wake me up in the middle of the night before it gets cold enough to freeze. Give it a try for yourself.

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