Battery voltage was being reported slightly lower each morning.\u00a0 There was a trend occuring that would eventually lead to a problem.\u00a0The refrigerator was working too hard.\u00a0 It seemed to run constantly.\u00a0 It used to get frosty, accumulating a layer of ice when we cruised.\u00a0 That hadn’t happened the last several years, but it had been still cold.\u00a0 Not so, this year.\u00a0 The troubleshooting part of the manual said to add refrigerant.\u00a0 I had done that to several automobile a\/c units and as the process looked similar, believed I could handle the Alder Badour unit.\u00a0 I found the connection and added some R-134a as specified.\u00a0 The cold plate frosted up nicely!\u00a0 \u00a0A job well done, or so I thought.<\/p>\n
The next morning, battery voltage was reported at 12.1, a new low!\u00a0 About the 50% state of charge, meaning nearly 300 amp hours had been consumed in the past 12 hours.\u00a0 It was cloudy most of the day, and stormy that evening.\u00a0 When it is raining, the panel produces almost no output.\u00a0 It varies on a cloudy day, sometimes barely mattering.\u00a0 This was not one of them.\u00a0 The wind conspired against me, keeping my radome positioned to cast a shadow on the panel (which nearly shut it down) for the portion of the day that had any usable light.\u00a0 By the next morning, battery voltage was 11.7.\u00a0 Discharging AGM batteries below the 50% level takes a toll on their state of health.\u00a0 I try to avoid anything that would curtail their useful lives.\u00a0 Time to plug her in to shore power and charge them up while I troubleshoot!<\/p>\n
The trouble was easy to identify– the refrigerator never shut off.\u00a0 The troubleshooting section of the manual says that not only can not enough refrigerant be the cause, but too much,\u00a0 as well!\u00a0 \u00a0Adjusting the system’s pressure to around 21 psi (about 6 psig) seems to yield the frost patterns the manual is looking for.\u00a0 The fridge is now cycling as expected and using the predicted 70 amp hours per 24 hours.\u00a0 Still, I am installing a switch that I can control remotely that will cut power to the unit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Battery voltage was being reported slightly lower each morning.\u00a0 There was a trend occuring that would eventually lead to a problem.\u00a0The refrigerator was working too hard.\u00a0 It seemed to run constantly.\u00a0 It used to get frosty, accumulating a layer of ice when we cruised.\u00a0 That hadn’t happened the last several years, but it had been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":793,"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions\/793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nptdock.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}