Picture this. You’ve pulled into camp but the site has an east-west slant. Never mind, you think to your self. It’s just for the night – I don’t mind sleeping on an angle if it means I don’t have to muck around with my wheel chocks. I have plenty of sympathy for this point of view; however, if your van uses an absorption fridge, you should make the effort to level your van.
Unlike compressor fridges, which are much the same as your fridge at home, absorption fridges, which can operate on 12V, 240V or gas, convert their refrigerant into gas (and back into a liquid) through the use of heat alone, with no moving parts other than the gas itself. In very simple terms, the gas cycles through a network of tubes. Liquid refrigerant evaporates inside a low-pressure vessel by absorbing heat from the inside of the fridge. The gas works its way towards a heat exchanger, which passes the heat to the air outside and allows the gas to condense back into a liquid. All of this, however, relies on the fridge being level. If the van is not level, the fridge won’t be level, either, and the refrigerant within the fridge will collect in certain areas and stop the cooling process. If an absorption fridge is out of level by just a few degrees, it might not work at all, especially in ambient temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius or more.
While it’s common to use a spirit level on the drawbar of the van to assess how level it is, this may not be enough. Some recommend using a small spirit level inside the fridge itself. Of course, this is awkward, so you would only need to do use a level inside the fridge once – find a spot inside the van, such as a bench top, that matches the level inside the fridge, and then level your van to this spot when setting up camp.
Also, remember that absorption fridges take longer to cool down than compressor fridges – four to eight hours, in fact. It’s good practice to turn the fridge on the night before departing for a trip.