RV Refrigerator Troubleshooting: Testing a Cooling Unit

To test the cooling unit in a refrigerator a dealer's gonna take and do a 24 hour hot test. And what that's doing is, we're gonna bypass all the control modules, a thermistor, temperatures anything like that, and just have this go wide open. What we're looking for is to make sure we don't have blockage in any of these coils, especially up on the top here. If this unit were parked in a driveway that was out of level and they plugged it in to try and cool the refrigerator down for a day or two days, we're gonna start getting some blockage, we're gonna get some flakes and so we wanna make sure that this is good and this is a good thing to have a dealership do or a repair facility to do. If you're looking to buy a used unit you wanna make sure this is going. So what we're gonna do is right down here and of course we've disconnected, we don't have no, the LP lines are shut off on ours here. And we're gonna disconnect... The two probes... Down here on our board. And this is also something that can be done inside the unit. We've... Hooked up a little test probe right here where we put two of the male spades in and we're just gonna plug these in. Like that. And plug that in. And I've got a cord, right over here. So again, we're bypassing all the controls. We're making sure this is gonna run at a hundred percent and it won't shut off due to temperature controls, inside thermistors or anything like that. We're gonna let it go for twenty four hours. And we're gonna come back here periodically and just test the temperature in each one of these, just to find out how well it's going to perform. Our cooling unit's been running a hard test now for about two hours and we're gonna let it run for twenty four but just to see what's happening here we've got our boiler down here, we start our heat element. We've got coming right off the heat element here... Of course, this is outside. It's only a hundred and one, but right off the top we have two hundred and seventy five degrees coming through here. And what we're looking for is a blockage somewhere that this is gonna hit, won't allow that fluid to go through and it's gonna drop back down and then we're gonna see a dramatic loss after that. So, we see here that two eighty eight, it's two hundred and thirty two. And we're naturally gonna get a little bit here because of the downsize of the unit. Got a hundred and eighty five, so it's not bad. Over here, this is gonna be the hottest one coming off the side and I can feel it. After it comes through our evaporator fins here, we're running at about a hundred and forty. So we're just making sure that everything is running about the same amount of temperature. So this cooling unit actually is working pretty well so far. But again, we're gonna let it run for about twenty four hours. We're gonna check it again just to make sure. We're gonna check the ambient temperature inside. I'm gonna check this right now and just see where we're at in the freezer section. And it's running right at about zero degrees inside there. So this cooling unit is actually performing very well.