Is there any way to keep dust out of the outside fridge compartment?

[John E Davies]

I have been doing more dirt road travel since I installed the Stone Stomper. Today I spent six hours exploring BLM land in Central WA and I covered over 60 miles of gravel ranch roads. To say my fridge coils were dusty would be an understatement.... when I got home I opened the two outside access panels and blew out a vast cloud with my gas powered leaf blower. The dust cannot be good for it, or my using big blasts of air to remove it....

 

 

 

I could make some solid covers and turn off the fridge completely, but I would rather not go to that extreme. Any links or ideas for filtration? The bottom opening is the worst, it is dead center in the main cloud kicked up by the truck.

 

I do have a 12 v ARB fridge that I could put under the table, or inside the back of truck, but it would be a real pain to have to move stuff back and forth.... and it has only a quarter the capacity.

 

Help! Should I just carry my blower on trips to purge the dirt? Do you think some Airtabs mounted in front of the openings would help? I did email them ... http://www.airtab.com/index.htm

 

Thanks,

 

John Davies

Spokane WA

 

 

[rideandfly]

John,

 

We turn the refrigerator off while towing and use reusable ice blocks to keep everything cool while traveling. We leave enough room in the freezer to re-freeze the blocks at night. Tried memory foam blocks behind the vent covers during storage, but not enough clearance for the blocks. Solid covers on the vent covers during travel on dusty roads should work when the refrigerator is turned off.

[mossemi]

Could you use your tire pump as a blower and leave the yard blower at home?

[John E Davies]

Could you use your tire pump as a blower and leave the yard blower at home?

 

My compressor doesn't have a high enough flow rate to clear the coils in between the two access openings. The blower does great. I do not have to take the extension tubes. If I had the blower I could also use it to clear the spot in front of the cabin door, but that would probably upset any neighbors.

 

John Davies

 

Spokane WA

[John E Davies]

John,

We turn the refrigerator off while towing and use reusable ice blocks to keep everything cool while traveling. We leave enough room in the freezer to re-freeze the blocks at night. Tried memory foam blocks behind the vent covers during storage, but not enough clearance for the blocks. Solid covers on the vent covers during travel on dusty roads should work when the refrigerator is turned off.

 

I could try that, but I do keep some frozen stuff in the freezer, so anything I wanted to keep froze hard would have to go in my ARB 12 vdc unit. The rest of the fridge contents could warm up a little without harm, I guess.

 

Can someone post pics of solid outside vent covers? I don't like to re-engineer what has already been sorted out.

 

I would desperately like to hear if other Ollie owners experience this issue! The lower vent location is extremely far down under the hull compared to most other RVs except maybe for popups. It is located directly in the path of the rooster tail generated by the truck. So, am I getting all this dirt due to the basic “design flaw”, or is this a nasty byproduct of my Stone Stomper installation, which keeps all the debris down low rather than letting it billow up and partly disperse into the gap between? I could take off the SS and do some tests, but I hope that owners can just tell me if it happens to you too.!!

 

If this is a design flaw then Oliver needs to be putting compressor fridges into their boondocking trailers. Or at least giving guidance about how to deal  with the situation.

 

Thanks.

 

John Davies

 

Spokane WA

[John E Davies]

Just had a random thought.

 

I could fabricate a long removable solid “running board” that could be slid onto brackets on the frame. It would also extend across the steps to the front of the hull, to act a deflector to keep the dust plume low down until it reached the rear wheels.

 

Could that be effective at all? It would look odd, but odd never stopped me before.

 

John Davies

 

Spokane WA

[Rumline]

Mark, great idea. But do you think that even a cheap filter might inhibit the flow too much?