The refrigerator in my 04 concourse started on fire while i was taking a nap. I woke up smelling a faint odor of some chemical. Within a matter of seconds the smell was over powering and i couldnt breath. I jumped up and killed all the breakers, jumped outside and unplugged the shore power, stepped to the passenger side and saw smoke coming out the fridge vent cover, jumped back inside grabbed my fire extinguisher, jumped back out and yanked the vent cover and saw flames so i emptied the extinguisher on it. The fire seemed to be out and all the wring was melted so i grabbed wrenches to disconnect all the batteries to eliminate any voltage. Needless to say the fridge is garbage at this point so i cut it in half and removed it from the rig because it smelled really bad like ammonia and chemicals inside.
It took me half a day to clean up the mess afterwards and another half of a day to find someone that would accept the burned fridge as scrap.
I wont install another absorption style fridge again which brings me to the point of this post. Whats the best Marine style fridge i can get? Best meaning most reliable and trouble free regardless of cost?
Wow, what a day for you! If you are on shore power, there should not be any flame... most fridge fire that I heard about happened when they are on LP. Was the fridge on the Dometic recalled list and have the recall kit installed already?
Anyway, it is more important that you are OK. Sounds like the rig was fine due to your quick action!
I think you may want to look at some of the compressor-based fridge on the market. They runs on 12V DC, no flame or heating element. There are a few thread on the forum if you want to do a search.
Again, very glad that you are not hurt.
2000 Concourse dinette, on 1999 6.8L Ford E350 Triton V-10 Chassis
Im not sure how it started. The 110 AC outlet and cord to the fridge were fine. You can see the scorch marks on the bottom of the fridge from fire.
But then you can also see the wires near the propane solenoid all melted because the propane valve was on fire. Sometimes i would run the fridge on propane because it seemed to get cooler on propane than electricity. I cant recall if it was set to propane or AC that day due to all the panic, once the fire was out there was no more checking the panel to see what it was set on.
I broke the vent cover getting it off in a panic, but beyond the fridge being destroyed there wasnt any other damage to the rig other than an extreme mess to clean up from the extinguisher dust. All i know is i smelled a faint chemical smell at first and while i was trying to figure out what i was smelling the entire rig was full of overpowering ammonia chemical fumes. Only then did i actually smell something that smelled like something burning.
Course i have my fire detector disconnected because i got tired of false alarms everytime i cooked something.
JabberBox wrote: ↑May 13th, 2021, 11:42 am
Course i have my fire detector disconnected because i got tired of false alarms everytime i cooked something.
<facepalm> I guess we can laugh at you only because you are fine. But that is not a smart thing to do, but we all done it because it is the quick solution.
The important thing is to figure out what to do next. I think you will find enough info in the forum. Keep us updated, since we all can learn from each others.
2000 Concourse dinette, on 1999 6.8L Ford E350 Triton V-10 Chassis
I have no idea about a recall fix or if it was performed by the previous owner. All i know is that i will never own another absorption fridge. Forget the fire, im lucky the chemical fumes didnt kill me. These fridges should not be inside any motorvehicle as far as im concerned. After seeing what these things can do first hand it simply is not worth the risk no matter how minute the chances of fire or leak. Imagine if i didnt happen to have a large fire extinguisher and was out driving on the freeway someplace instead of parked. It would have been a complete disaster. I emptied a large extinguisher putting out the fire, large as in like you would find inside a school house or government building, not one of those small ones that everyone has. The propane portion of the fire was just a tiny flame at the solenoid. The big portion of the fire seemed to be the chemicals that were escaping from the fridge. Once i reached under the truck and shut off the propane valve the solenoid fire pretty much quit. But the other stuff kept burning whatever it was. I couldnt see where the flames were originating i could just see flames and smoke.
My new rule is that the propane valve will be shut at all times unless i need to cook, and there will never be another absorption fridge in anything i own. Simply is not worth the risk that goes with it.
From the photo, it does not looks like it has the recall kit installed. It will be great if you have the serial number on the fridge and can confirm if your needs the recall. If it does not, it will be a service to current Dometic owners to let the manufacturer know about this incidence, so they can prevent similar thing from happening.
2000 Concourse dinette, on 1999 6.8L Ford E350 Triton V-10 Chassis
The fridge is gone so i dont have the serial number. It had to be disposed of as hazardous waste. No one would accept it at the dump or the scrap yards.
Federal laws and regulations are making it nearly impossible for the average person to dispose of waste products that corporations are allowed to sell the public. I shouldnt be penalized for attempting to dispose of a hazardous product that i purchased and have no intricate knowledge of beyond it keeping my food cold. The corporations should be penalized in advance for knowingly producing and selling hazardous products to the public for profit.
I feel your frustration, and it is a very serious problem, but I do not see a viable way to get around with it.
In my house, there are a bit of heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and some toxic metal (thallium, indium,etc) halides in lamps, paint, electronics, and batteries. I have some medications and gardening chemicals that are considered highly toxic. We as consumers generally do not consider the cradle-to-grave aspect of a product or process, and certainly the manufacturer (and the government for the most part) have the same issue. We look at how much it cost to buy a product, and maybe the shipping cost, but we do not consider the maintenance, repair, and the disposal aspect of it most of the time. We usually do not consider the volume (for landfill), and recyclability, toxicity, radioactivity, and bio-degradeability, and the seller/manufacture knew that we don't.
When we buy the rig, we do not consider how many gallons of gas/diesel it going to be used, how much CO2 it going to generate, or what it takes to dispose of it. We figured that we can either sell it to the next person, or if something bad happened, there is a junk yard with a spare spot for it. When we brought an EV, we do not look at where the electricity is generated, and what happened when the battery is dead and needs to be recycled. Every product we buy, and every service we used have some hidden price behind it. The bad excuse for the fridge manufacturer is that they are not unique, and we just let others take care of the trouble. In your case, there are some responsible parties that realize that they can't simply bring it to the scrap yard. For majority of the cases, people simply mix it with other regular trash, and disposed of it like a murdered body parts.
In some states, they charged the consumer some nominal fee for recycling. There is a fee for soda cans, and maybe electronics. But these effort are not very efficient, and not very transparent. If the recycling is profitable, we see issue like stolen catalytic converter. If it is not profitable, we see soda cans all over the beach. It is a very hard problem, and the lazy answer is that we do nothing for now.
2000 Concourse dinette, on 1999 6.8L Ford E350 Triton V-10 Chassis
I pay a monthly bill that includes trash pickup twice weekly. For decades they picked up the garbage, then all of a sudden out of no place and for no valid reason corrugated cardboard becomes an issue and the city passes an ordinance prohibiting residents from throwing cardboard in the trash subject to a $500 fine per incident.
That left the city residents with two options, pay an additional monthly bill to the same trash collector to pick up your cardboard at the curb once a week or waste your valuable time and fuel to drive your cardboard to one of the designated disposal sites, fold the cardboard into nice flat sheets so as to fit within the dumpster so the trash company doesnt have to pay additional employees to flatten the cardboard boxes prior to selling them to a recycler. Once the trash company sells the cardboard to the recycler the city gets its cut of the money..
This is nothing more than legalized extortion and racketeering. Cardboard will degrade quickly when left exposed to the elements and is not a threat to the environment, in fact earth worms love it. Its nothing more than the city and the trash company forcing the public to provide them with materials they can sell for a profit. It has nothing to do with cardboard being a danger to anything.
