Two years ago, my husband LB_3 and I replaced our second failing Dometic RM 2351 propane refrigerator with a Vitrifrigo marine fridge (complete instructions in this blog post
here, and incidentally this was the same problematic fridge model featured on
the epic Air Forums "Simple Survey" thread built by Base Camp owners).
Well, like most good projects, our conversion needed tweaking, which we did this morning. Upon going back through the B-van child forum, I realized that we never did have a thread dedicated to the topic of fridge conversions. We had a lot of good pros vs. cons discussions on fridge conversions generally, but no dedicated thread - that content is spread among multiple other threads. THIS thread will serve a more cohesive purpose going forward. I'll backfill it later with links to the other dispersed conversations.
Meanwhile, picking up where I left off two years ago, the Vitrifrigo marine fridge was not the exact same size as the cabinetry cut-out made by Airstream. I covered the conversion in the blog post linked above.
The cabinetry mods left us with a "slot" on the left hand side of the fridge. Initially I used that as a storage space for one of our Rumpl blankets. You can see it here, a bit brighter orange than the surrounding cabinets:
Experience being the great teacher that it is, I eventually realized that this was not a good idea. Because the van was built with a propane fridge ventilation system that remains open to the exterior, there was too much moisture getting into that blanket, even if it was not exposed directly to wet conditions.
No problem - I pulled out the blanket and began storing the CGear Sand Free Mat in the same slot. Doesn't matter if that thing gets damp - it is made of polypropylene.
EXCEPT for the fact that the sand free mat was too porous. The resulting air pathways in through the fridge slot were short-circuiting the entire van ventilation system. The Interstate relies on air flow through the rear and slider flap windows to achieve efficient air exchanges. If the make-up air comes in through the fridge cabinet instead, the whole thing just does not function.
So we had to abandon the handy storage "slot" and seal it off. We did this using furring strips that we cut ourselves (we actually carved them out of our original prototype dog front seat platform, which you can see
here, because it was already painted with cabinetry-matched high-grade enamel paint). And we also added 3-M aluminum tape to seal off the joints as best we could.
This pic below tells a tale of the same condensation that was not good for our Rumpl blanket. See those stains on top of the Vitrifrigo? Those are not leak stains. Those are condensation stains, from temperature differentials across the fridge cabinetry. No wonder the blanket was getting musty in that slot. The lower pic shows the view from outside the fridge vent looking inward at the aluminum tape effort. It was difficult to get the aluminum tape up in there and install it straight, but it still does the sealing job.
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