Now that I have told you all about the inverter, let’s take a step back and deal with the more critical electrical problem: the failure of the inverter switch. The problem manifested, about 10 days ago, with the refrigerator suddenly and unexpectedly losing power. I was panicked at first, thinking that the refrigerator itself had failed – a problem that could potentially cost more than $3,000 to fix. But after trying several things (checking circuit breakers, jiggling wires, voodoo incantations) that were unsuccessful, I, on a whim, flipped the inverter (the old one that never worked) on. It still didn’t work, but it failed in a comfortably familiar was – the refrigerator came on, briefly, until the inverter overloaded and quit. This was pretty solid proof that there was no problem with the refrigerator (whew!) and that the problem was somewhere in the rather complex circuitry that powered it.
New switch and junction box at end of installation
So I got, from the file of RV stuff that we keep, the documentation on the inverter and, along with it, the documentation on the inverter switch. This is the electronic component that automatically switches the power on the refrigerator circuit between regular (land) power and inverter (travel) power. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this switch was likely misbehaving. I pulled the cover off this box and the junction box below it, just to get an idea of the circuitry. I tried various things that sort of worked for a little bit, but then the circuit would fail again. I eventually gave up, re-routed the circuit to bypass the switch entirely and hooked it up to an external outlet. Then I ordered a replacement switch.
After a week of running the refrigerator on a jury-rigged circuit, I received the replacement switch. It took about an hour to install it. Much to my relief the refrigerator ran perfectly on both land and inverter power.
Total cost of the inverter and switch: about $300. But now, for the first time, I am confident that the refrigerator will have power when we travel.
Now we have to go somewhere and test it out.
As much as I hate spending good money on things that shouldn’t break, I am deeply grateful that it failed while we were in residence. Had that switch failed while we were up north, we would have returned to a refrigerator filled with thawed, rotting food. It would have been an unholy mess and I can’t imagine what the smell would have been like or how long I would have had to toil to make the place livable again. So if it had to fail, it picked a good time to do it.