Going from a standard propane powered RV fridge with locking door to a full residential AC powered fridge in your RV does have a small learning curve. You can see the price we paid for this education. I’ll share.

The larger residential fridge was an appealing option when we went bought our new 5th wheel. After all, we’ll soon be living in this thing nearly full time.

With an upgrade to solar, more batteries, and a state of the art Go Power 2,000 Amp 3 in 1 inverter, we were set on the power front. But the feature we missed, the most simple feature of all, was a lock to hold the doors closed.

We thought the bungees would hold the doors back just fine, and they probably would have had it not been for the weight of the beer and eggs combined with highway 68 climbing out of Borrego Springs.

Three hours of drive time to San Diego, a hot closed-up RV on a sunny day: This was destined for ugly…

It was a smelly mess upon arrival. On top of that, I didn’t notice that a wayward beer had escaped the fridge and rolled behind the edge of the slide, so when I opened the slide I crushed the beer and successfully sprayed the entire living area with a warm and thoroughly shaken beer. Aaaarrrgh!

Lessons to learn:

1. The manufacturers “Bungee solution” doesn’t work.
2. Keep the food in your fridge secure, (common sense 101). Make sure it can’t slide around during travel.
3. Keep the weight of lose items low. If it can’t be made secure and you’re going to keep heavy items in the fridge, make sure it can’t fall against the doors and leverage them open when turning, duh.
4. Install a locking mechanism that will work on your fridge. Simple solutions will do, even a Velcro strap on the handles to aid the bungees.
5. Keep eggs in a drawer or other secure location in the fridge. What was I thinking!

We’re figuring out our new Cardinal 3250 Fifth wheel. First long trip is Canada in June 2017. Hope we figure out the big stuff by then.

In the fall we’ll be hitting the road to promote our new website, RVPlusYou. We’ll be recruiting RV rental managers to help RV owners earn extra income by sharing their RV.

By then our hope is that we’ve learned a thing or two. Stay tuned!