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Recently, when temperatures dropped below 0 degrees at our current location in Wichita, our refrigerator and freezer started warming up instead of cooling down. A local RV technician told us that some RV refrigerators won’t work in temperatures below zero. The fix was to heat up the cooling unit to keep the liquid inside from getting too cold. We know of some people who installed a light in their refrigerator vent compartment, but since we don’t have that much space back there, we used a small 250 watt heater. To prevent damage, we shut off our fridge and let the heat run for several hours before attempting to turn the fridge on again. Once the cooling unit had warmed up, the fridge worked again.

We also partially covered the outside vent to keep out some of the cold wind. This is fine to do since we are running our fridge off of electricity BUT NOT ADVISED IF RUNNING THE FRIDGE OFF OF PROPANE. In that case, the fumes from burning propane are not properly vented and can seep into the rig and be lethal! The propane also needs the oxygen coming through the vents to burn.

Now when we know the weather is going to be below freezing, we turn the heater on low as a preventative. Once the weather warms up or we are preparing to take off down the road once more, we make sure to remove our heater and store away for the next cold spell.

This heater has a safety mechanism. If it falls over, the heater automatically turns off.

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