Finishing Up Projects

Monday - For the first time in quite a while, long pants and a sweatshirt have been dug out. It’ll warm up soon enough but first thing in the morning, it feels chilly. 

I disconnected the compressor this morning for a while as the refrigerator was down to 24°F. A little on the cold side. We don’t have any produce in the fridge as it’ll go bad if frozen. 

I primed the refrigerator trim after using the tools in the RV park wood shop. I had wanted to use their router table to round off the exposed edges but the collet was broken on their router. Instead, I used the table saw to put a 45° bevel in the edge. I am planning to prime the back of the trim to protect it from moisture then paint it with semi-gloss black enamel. I think it’ll look pretty good. They had a nice drum sander that I ran the pieces through to reduce their thickness from 3/4” to 5/8” which is what I needed. Pretty nice tool.

Tuesday - This morning, I installed the new controller. This one is installed inside of the refrigerator replacing the fans. It has a temperature sensor built into the unit and is actually adjustable using the built in LED display.  I left it at the factory default of 34°F. I also left the original controller wired in since that is where I’m pulling power for my microprocessor. This is counter to their directions where they have you remove all of the Dometic components. 

Afterwards, I lightly sanded my trim pieces and painted them with satin black enamel. It takes 24 hours to dry completely. I’ll see if they need a second coat at that time. 

Around 5pm, I turned off the shore power charging function of the inverter to see what our overnight power use is. At the current consumption of 8.4A, the projected battery life is 1d 4h. That assumes only 50% of our lead acid batteries are available. 

Wednesday - This morning, we got a call from the flooring contractor asking about starting tearing out the tile and carpeting in the RV. We headed back and started putting things away. The only flooring that will remain is a small section of the bedroom in front of the closet and the carpet and tile around the front seats and door. The slides and the bedroom will be re-carpeted and everywhere else will have vinyl plank flooring.

The batteries were at 85% this morning with just the refrigerator running on 12V. The temperature of  the refrigerator stabilized at around 38°F and the freezer was in the teens. Then I checked the ice maker and it was dribbling water into the freezer. I turned off and unplugged the ice maker and the freezer temperature steadily dropped and stabilized at around 5°F.