Replacement boards do cost money, but it’s still a whale of a lot less expensive than replacing an otherwise “good” refrigerator. It’s a case of, “Well, we’d be happy to direct you to a dealer where you can by a new refrigerator, furnace, water heater,” etc. That’s a common complaint among RVers: Many control boards aren’t “replaceable” with OEM boards. Maybe there was a bit of tongue-in-cheek here because the old “pudding covered” board out of the back of our ‘fridge was “out of production” from the reefer maker.
To his credit, in addition to making a suggestion for a given Dinosaur board, the technician did suggest we could try an OEM replacement board. The Dino-tech walked us through a series of tests with a digital multi-tester that verified our refrigerator control board was ready for the scrap pile. After an initial discussion of the problem the technician asked if we wouldn’t mind checking a couple of things “in situ,” right on the back of the refrigerator. We called in and immediately tied into one of Dinosaur’s tech fellows. The Dino folks build replacement boards for just about every RV appliance (and generator) application there is. Built by a seemingly obscure company, Dinosaur boards are the leading word in replacement control boards. Yep, when campfire talk comes around to appliance control board problems the name probably mentioned most is Dinosaur. So we called the horse’s mouth or, should we say, the Dinosaur’s mouth. We contacted an RV refrigeration supplier who opined that it “sounded like” a board too, but he couldn’t really be sure without running tests on it. The whole works pointed to a control board failure, or so it seemed. In a safe harbor with another working fridge available we started down through the diagnostics process. We cut our time in the field short and headed back to base camp.
Gas didn’t light, and DC simply knocked all the low-voltage power out throughout the rig. Only by turning on the generator and resorting to “shore power” would we get any chill in the box.
Sitting on a hot parking lot just outside of Old Mexico our refrigerator stopped being a chill box and the threat of global warming parked itself right in the middle of our kitchen. One time, one of our 3-way refrigerators, which had been a straight-A student, suddenly went rebellious on us. Nowadays, the trouble is when things start getting “buggy” it can be difficult to track down the problem. Of course, “back in the old days” a lot of us had to go outside in the cold or heat to light off those selfsame appliances. “Back in the old days,” as some of us recall, we didn’t have fancy control boards on refrigerators, furnaces and water heaters. Perhaps some of the most mysterious of RV technical issues surrounds electronically controlled appliances.
0 kommentar(er)
