WITHOUT FRIDGE DEFEND YOU ARE NOT PROTECTED
Dometic & Norcold reliability and fire safety, can you live without it?
WITHOUT FRIDGE DEFEND YOU ARE NOT PROTECTED
Dometic & Norcold reliability and fire safety, can you live without it?
Fridge Defend is all about Dometic safety, we recommend a GFI (ground fault interrupter) or GFCI shore power outlet to protect your RV fridge heaters.
This image shows an electric heater GFI on the power supply to an RM1350 Dometic RV fridge. GFI or GFCI plugs are generally the same device. One of our customers reported that the Fridge Defend by ARP turned off their fridge. They turned off the ARP to restart their fridge. Luckily this event happened at night, thus when the fridge restarted on 120VAC the owner of the RV went out to look and witnessed the bottom of one heater glowing red hot.
It is our opinion that the heater could have shored internally. If this is the case, a GFI or GFCI type receptacle may prevent this type of failure mode. A GFI receptacle on your fridge will shut down the fridge if any short to ground occurs. It just makes good RV safety sense to take this small and inexpensive measure to protect your Dometic fridge and your RV. If the above mentioned customer did not have the Fridge Defend, this may have turned into another RV fridge fire.
We encourage you to check your fridge to see if the manufacture has installed a GFI on your fridge outlet. Some manufactures power the fridge from a GFI plug that is located in another part of the RV, such as the bathroom GFI. A GFI receptacle is one part of a package of RV safety equipment which includes the Fridge Defend Control and a fire extinguisher in your RV.