did you know that your refrigerator in
your RV has to be fairly close to level
for proper operation and that you could
damage it uh if it's too far off level
this is an excerpt from uh the owner's
manual for my refrigerator and it
cautions to make sure that you're within
3° off level or less side to side and 6°
off level or less back to back
from the front of the refrigerator uh in
order to operate uh the refrigerator
safely now of course when you put it in
a motor home my refrigerator has turned
90° so in reality the motor home has to
be uh 3° from front to back and 6° from
side to
side if you have an RV you should have
one of these torpedo levels they're
inexpensive they're only a couple
bucks and uh they can help determine
whether or not your RV is level in order
to determine whether or not you can run
your
refrigerator however uh before you can
really do that you have to calibrate
this to see whether uh where 3° and
where 6°
is well to make the math easy um what I
did is I uh got out a trig calculator
and tried a 3/4 in rise and a 1 and 1/2
in rise in the uh calculator and come up
with basically a 14 and 516 inch
distance and we're going to use these
figures to calibrate our uh torpedo
level so that we know exactly where 3
and 6°
is and the reason why I chose 3/4 and
one and a half is because that's the
common size of uh finished wood so if
you have a wood board at home chances
are it's 3/4 inch uh thick and if you
double up and stack one on top of the
other then you get one and2 Ines so
that's why I use those two
values at this point I'm going to
calibrate my uh spirit
level what I have here is a couple of uh
3/4 in thick random pieces of wood and
just another black of wood and make sure
that it's straight and the easiest way
to make sure wood like this is straight
is just to look down the in like that
and you can see if there's any cupping
or bowing anyway I I marked off a spot
here that's 14 and 5/16 um from this
point so when we take a 3/4 in block of
wood and line it up to a Merc here then
we know this is at an incline of 3° as
long as we're sure that this is uh level
so we can see here this Bas is level and
I'm doing this on a a drill press which
is pretty
level okay so then when we put this on
here you can see that even at
3° see I can't get it to raise much more
so basically at
3° this level is all the
way the bubble's all the way to one
end the same thing
here okay now we'll also want to check
the level
at the vertical just for convenience
sake so in order to do that I'll take a
carpenter square and lay it on the uh
block of wood here and
then put this
here now on this one there leaves a
little room for a wiggle room because
you can see I
can if I tilt it
more I can get a little bit more but
actually the the center of those two
lines is about
3° so if the bubble is centered on one
of these lines it's 3° and I'll mark
that here and then when the bubble is
all the way gone it's 3° and I a even
going to even mess with 6° of course cuz
that's beyond the capability of the
spirit level but long as you calibrate
it and know where it's at then you can
make your decision whether to fire up
your uh refrigerator or not so remember
our our uh specification refrigerator
said
3° side to side 6° front to back since
we've turned the orientation
90° with refrigerator being fit into the
motor home now we have 6° side to side
and 3° front to back when I put this
spirit level in here I see that the
refrigerator is about 3 de front to back
which is about the maximum it can
tolerate so in reality I don't want to
start the fr Ator up when it's in this
position of course if we were to look on
the other
orientation then it is pretty level so
it it would work in one plane but not in
the other that's why when we're parked
in the driveway where we're at now I'm
not going to fire the refrigerator up
unless it's a little more level because
this this should be ideally a little
little bit more to the center I mean
it's
borderline but uh you know why chance it
when you're making this
measurement uh I like to make it in the
bottom of the the uh freezer tray
because there's virtually nothing level
on this RV if you look at the floor if
you look at the countertop they're all
off you know this is off
City even under the
frame you could probably use that or you
can use the
base if we're going to go on a long trip
we'll often come here and turn or
refrigerator on the the night before so
that it's cold uh when we pack our uh
food
stuff however if we're just going to go
a short distance uh in especially if the
coach isn't level which it is not now
we'll just leave this off and throw all
of our stuff into uh a cooler until we
get to our
destination