Well, I’ve been writing about the ongoing Dometic recall in this post and this post, and today I had an unwelcome finding- working on a refrigerator I had done the recall on nearly a year ago, but the cooling unit failed in the area concerned with the recall.
Called to order a new cooling unit, and was told that Dometic is no longer replacing failed cooling units out of the warranty period.
Needless to say, I am not a happy camper.
–Chris
You can subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post. You can also reply to this post directly in your weblog, and take advantage of the TrackBack URI to record your reply in this post.
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, comments are moderated, so they will not appear right away.HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  | |
| By N2H | |||||||
This page is a printout of part of rx4rv.com.
URL of this printout: http://rx4rv.com/archives/28
rx4rv.com uses
WordPress. Burnin-R theme by Rudd-O!
This Web site may require a highly standards compliant Web browser. Tested on Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror
and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.
There were 36 queries in 1.165 seconds.
Subscribe to rx4rv
June 20th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
why did Dometic stop doing recalls on refers
June 20th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
They still are doing the recalls, though some shops are not doing them.
Dometic has changed their websites around a bit- the recall website is now http://www2.dometicusa.com/recall.php
July 28th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Dometic sucks! The recall will only band-aid the problem and keep the problem from burning down the RV. They will not fix the problem they caused and replace the failed cooling units. I will never purchase a Dometic product again!!!!
August 12th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Three certified fire inspectors just left my home after investigating a fire that started in the Dometic refregirator in my Cougar travel trailer. I had the recall repair done on this unit in November, 2007 and it still caught fire sitting in my back yard !!!
The repair done on the recall was to add a piece of sheet metal heat shield between the LP gas burner and the skin of the RV, because someone thought that when the burner was on it could overheat the outer skin of the RV and cause a fire.
The actual cause of the fire was a leak in the ammonia piping. Under certain conditions anhydrous ammonia vapor can become flammable if it is in a 15 to 28 % concentration. This leak was in the area where the sleeve containing the 120 volt heating element which is welded to the chimney area of the ammonia tubing. Anhydrous ammonia is very corrosive to most metals and manafacturers use a low carbon steel and since the ammonia is mixed with water they add a chemical to the water to prevent corrosion in the steel tubing. This is evindenced by yellow deposits left after the ammonia / water mixture has leaked out.
Without doing further metalurgical testing it looks like dissimilar metals were welded together which combined with the vibrations from towing an RV eventually caused the leak. As long as the refregerator is only powered by 120 volts the only risk is enough ammonia is lost to affect the cooling capicaty of the refregerator.
In summary, don’t be fooled by thinking just because the recall repair was done on your Dometic refregerator there is no longer a fire hazard, the true root cause of the fires has not yet been addressed.
August 20th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Ed,
I would definitely file a report with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This is specifically what the recall was designed to prevent, with the sheet metal and thermal fuses, which are designed to shut the refrigerator off in case of a fire.