It may be time to replace the cabin refrigerator

Here are some odd thoughts for your analysis:

1.Very few residential or automotive refrigerant repir ffolks will accept marina refrigernt repair job mostly because of the fact that you have to remove a built in marine refrigerator to accessany part of the refrigerant section.

2. Then you usually have to get them out of the carpeted/upholstered part of the cabin which is an aggravating job at best to do the repair.

3. You refrigerator was produced at or near the point when there was some shaking out of the marine refrigerator, freezer and icemaker vendor suppliers going on. This means repair parts may no longer be available for your 2001 refreigertor/freezer. That means if you cannot get repair parts, you may have difficulty finding a replacement unit that fits the hole in your cabin that your unit came out of. This also means time is not on your side if you want to defer the repair/replace decision for very long very long.

4. Therefore, there is more to the repair/replace decision than the cost of a new unit The older units seem to have lasted fairly well my '96 450DA had a seperate refrigeratror and freezer ……in 30 years they never needed to be serviced and are still running normally today and all I ever did to them was clean then interior and wash & wax the interior and visible parts of the cabinet. There are several owners participtating in this thread with boats about the age of yours and I'd bet most of them are still on their original refrigerator.

Good luck with your decision ……...


Frank
 
If the freezer is only getting down to ~27F, then you definitely have a cooling problem. Does the compressor run continuously? There is a thermister, usually located in the bottom of the evaporator coils. This thermister is the sensor to the thermostat. If the compressor is running continuously, then it's likely an issue with the R-134 in the system. If the compressor is cycling then the thermostat thinks it's being "satisfied" that the freezer is cold enough and shutting of the compressor. If that's the case you have to figure out why... could be a bad thermistor, or something causing the area around the thermistor to get colder than the rest of the evaporator.

Also.. someone earlier mentions cleaning the coils (condensor coils in the back). I've not seen these ever get clogged up, but it's possible. What's also possible is that something changed to block off the flow of air that's getting to the back of the fridge... is that possible? That would cause a loss of cooling ability as well.
 
mrsrobinson said:
Following up with those who asked, I put a temperature sensor in and it's staying around 54°. Freezer is 27°

This is the make and model.

View attachment 150156
Click to expand...
I was the one that asked.

Quite sure that you are going to hammer me on the next sentence, no worries on my end.

54 degrees is safe for beer. But, please don't serve guests other stuff that sits in there at at 54.

My opinion is this - Replace the DE461, it's old and tired, parts are impossible or difficult to find. If you want to stay with Norcold, The DE0061 is the same size as the DE 461 and the screw holes line up too.
 
Sgrochow said:
I was the one that asked.

Quite sure that you are going to hammer me on the next sentence, no worries on my end.

54 degrees is safe for beer. But, please don't serve guests other stuff that sits in there at at 54.

My opinion is this - Replace the DE461, it's old and tired, parts are impossible or difficult to find. If you want to stay with Norcold, The DE0061 is the same size as the DE 461 and the screw holes line up too.
Click to expand...
Great post.

Where is @Pirate Lady with that Drum and cymbal ending meme?
 
km1125 said:
If the freezer is only getting down to ~27F, then you definitely have a cooling problem. Does the compressor run continuously? There is a thermister, usually located in the bottom of the evaporator coils. This thermister is the sensor to the thermostat. If the compressor is running continuously, then it's likely an issue with the R-134 in the system. If the compressor is cycling then the thermostat thinks it's being "satisfied" that the freezer is cold enough and shutting of the compressor. If that's the case you have to figure out why... could be a bad thermistor, or something causing the area around the thermistor to get colder than the rest of the evaporator.

Also.. someone earlier mentions cleaning the coils (condensor coils in the back). I've not seen these ever get clogged up, but it's possible. What's also possible is that something changed to block off the flow of air that's getting to the back of the fridge... is that possible? That would cause a loss of cooling ability as well.
Click to expand...
This is good information, thank you. No, the compressor does not run continuously.
 
If you've not done this already, then one other thing I'd suggest is to shut it down for a day or so. I've had two situations over the last ~20 years where I had a normally good working fridge stop cooling. After checking everything and nearly giving up, I had shut it down in expectations of replacing it. On a whim, I repowered it a couple days later and it started working just fine and ran for years and years just fine. On another occasion, after defrosting the fridge it would not start cooling sufficiently. After leaving it off for a day, started it up and it ran fine.

If the compressor isn't running all the time then the one thing you can try is removing the drip tray under the freezer section. That divides the freezer and fridge sections so they freezer will actually freeze and some of that cold air will spill down to the fridge to keep it cold. Removing the drip tray allow more air to flow. The freezer will likely no longer freeze, but the fridge should get colder. If the compressor still doesn't run continuously (or more often), then it could be something in the control or power circuits. I'm guessing that you've mostly been running on A.C. while checking this.... have you let it run on D.C. for a while to see if there's a difference? As long as you have a good battery charger aboard, this shouldn't an issue and all you have to do is cut the A.C. breaker to the fridge to test this for a few hours.
 
We found out when we were cruising that the Norcold could not recover in a timely manner from having the door open for more than a few seconds like at meal time, and forget about it when provisioning with room temperature items after grocery shopping, but even then it wasn’t as bad as the temps you posted above. You need a new fridge before someone gets sick imo.
There are a lot of choices, we went with a Vitrifrigo 8 years ago. It was a perfect match for our cabinet and had slightly more capacity than the Norcold And didn’t cost a fortune. It recovers quickly from having the door open and runs a lot less than the Norcold did.Then get a decent remote thermometer with history so that when the power goes out or another boater mistakenly shuts off your breaker at a transient dock, you know that your fridge was fine despite the flashing microwave.
Can’t comment on how hard it would be to replace yours, it was a breeze in our DB.

our temps right now
598F4A3A-81BF-4680-859E-DC6E28E5DA69.jpeg
 
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