Spoiled, chunky milk. Bricks of moldy cheese. Rotten vegetables. 

None of this sounds appetizing and it is even less appealing when you wake up to it in the morning. 

We have had some questions come in lately asking what other types of things people may need to think about when traveling in an RV and though we have briefly mentioned it, one aspect to think about is food storage. 

After spending the large chunk of change to replace our refrigerator, we thought we would be good to go. But there is one topic that I don’t see discussed very often when it comes to RVs. And that is fridge efficiency. 

Unlike a home refrigerator, that is more effective at circulating the cool air throughout the fridge, an RV fridge does a pretty poor job of this. To combat this, they sell these little fans that you can place inside to help with circulation. 

The problem with these fans is that they not only take up some of your already limited space, but they also use a ton of batteries to power them. Not so efficient, in my mind. 

Because of this, we have held off on purchasing one. To some pretty gross and unfortunate consequences. Like the spoiled milk. 

What ends up happening is that our cooling fins, which are just above the top shelf in the fridge, start to build up a lot of ice on them, making them less effective at keeping the fridge cool. 

This means that the food in the upper shelves is typically fine but anything on the lower shelves or in the drawers is really not much cooler than the inside of our RV. Causing some gross results. 

We have tried different cooling settings on our thermostat. With limited success. 

What we have learned is that if we are not going to purchase one of these little fans, we need to periodically defrost our refrigerator. 

Though our freezer does not seem to have this issue to a terrible extent, we defrost it as well. 

Thankfully, our park has a fridge in the office where we can put our unspoiled food while we defrost things. So far, we have only needed to do this a couple of times but it is still something to remember!

Once things are defrosted and back to normal, the fridge cools the lower shelves nicely. Our only issue has been that items on the very top shelf get incredibly cold, so we cannot place sensitive food items here — such as certain vegetables. 

We love to get questions from people who are curious about our lifestyle! Please feel free to contact us in the comment section or send us an email at:

thewanderingdolphin@gmail.com.