Roger Ford of Ford’s Refrigeration shows you one of his customer’s fifth wheel trailers, an Alpine fifth wheel by Keystone, with a refrigerator that won’t work, and never will, he says.
The problem is the refrigerator’s air circulation is not adequate to keep it cool, which Ford says can happen with refrigerators built into slide-outs. He wonders why “high paid” engineers at Keystone wouldn’t have figured that out before letting the design get into production.
In the four-minute video, Ford shows you the problem and what the owner did to try to fix it, to no avail.
https://youtu.be/T021bascFiY
With the advancement in RV Refrigeration, you should look for and consider purchasing an RV with a Residential Fridge and Inverter setup. NOW this will Not apply to all RV’s! There are many RV’s that are too small to accommodate Residential Refrigerators. But in this case this large 5th wheel it would probably work.
Just my 3 cents worth.
The fans shown are installed to pull air into the space- not to vent it out. There should also be a good fan inside the fridge with air blowing across the cooling fins.
Time to add 2 vents in the roof of the slide. With 3 fans up there and normal air flow it may work.
You would think the “engineers” for Keystone (Thor?) would know better.
Beau Ceau bucks for today’s krap on wheels and college boy engineers can’t,or won’t,design a cooling unit that is problem free.Little wonder why older RV’s had better design and components,many are still in use today.
I eventually got the slide-mounted fridge in our old Fun Finder to work fairly well, with a complicated system of large (8″) computer fans and styrofoam baffling, but it was enough of a PITA that “fridge in slide” joined “east/west bed” on the list of things that instantly get any camper removed from our consideration.
Have a 2008 Nash 26Z Travel Trailer with the frig in the slideout. It has one small electric fan on the inside of the top vent. Have used it many times and have had no problems with it working as a frig should. My point is that just because your frig is in the slideout it doesn’t mean that it will be a problem.