Dometic absorption fridge will not get under 48 when it is 102 out, Jayco Pinnacle 36FBTS

the chase. go up on the roof and look at the vent above the fridge, then look down behind it with a flashlight through the lower sidewall vent.

on our 297RSTS there was a four inch gap over the top of the fridge where hot air could roll back down into the cavity instead of leaving through the roof. a piece of aluminum flashing from the hardware store, bent and foil taped across that gap so the only way out is up, cost twelve dollars. we picked up six degrees in august heat and that is not a guess, we had the same kind of pad on the door that you do.

while you are back there, ours had a wasp nest and about a quarter inch of packed valley dust in the lower screen. air has to come in the bottom or none of the rest of it works.

watching this one. it hit 97 with the humidity we get in spartanburg last week and the cougar does the same thing.

honest question for anybody who has gone through with it: is the 12 volt compressor swap worth the money and the cabinet surgery, or do you just trade one set of complaints for another? every time i price one i get to about 1,400 plus a second battery and then i close the tab.

fans. two 80 millimeter 12 volt computer fans, the quiet kind, zip tied to the fin tube at the top of the cooling unit, blowing up and out the roof vent. i wired mine to the fridge's own 12 volt through a thermal switch clipped to the flue so they only run when it is working. parts came to twenty dollars because the fans were in a drawer.

seven degrees off the middle shelf the first afternoon. the kits people sell you are the same two fans for sixty five.

other thing, and i see it all over tyler every summer: do not run the slide awning out over the lower sidewall vent. people shade the wall and then wonder why the fridge gave up.

sixteen years of other people's fridges, so here is the unglamorous part. the two things i found most often in my own park were a flue full of soot and a trailer parked with the fridge wall facing west.

pull the burner cover and look up the flue with a mirror. any flaky black in there and a flue brush plus ten minutes gets it. a sooted flue will chug along fine at 80 degrees out and fall on its face at 100. and if you get to choose which way you sit, put the fridge wall on the morning side. i have watched the same trailer read six degrees different depending on which way the nose pointed.

nobody wants to hear the last part. these units are built to hold about 40 degrees below ambient and no further. at 103 you are entitled to an honest 45. that is the design and not a fault.

did all three. flue had some soot, not terrible, brushed it out. built the baffle out of a scrap of aluminum from the shop here in livingston plus nine dollars of foil tape. fans went in saturday morning, pulled out of an old desktop in the basement storage.

yesterday: 101 outside at 4pm, 41 on the middle shelf, 8 in the freezer. that is the fridge i had in april. i also pulled the slide awning back in over the vent side, tyler, which in five years i had never once thought about.

the service literature at dometic.com has the venting diagram and the clearance spec in it, and my factory install does not match it, which tells you something about how fast these trailers go down the line.

late to this. florida version of the same problem, except our enemy is humidity and a dry afternoon never arrives.

two cheap things that helped in the montana. a little usb fan inside the box moving air between the shelves, five dollars, because an absorption unit has no circulation of its own and my top shelf and crisper used to read eight degrees apart. and we quit loading warm groceries. the bags sit in the truck cab with the ac on until everything is cold and then they go in the trailer. sounds silly. works.