Fiat Ducato

 I thought I'd pen a few lines to show how I've maintained my Fiat Ducato, especially the campervan version, and here only in areas of untypical maintenance. Our camper was made by a company called Adria having been modified from a standard van built in 2005. The date is fairly important because not long after that date various changes were introduced making spare parts often tricky to identify correctly.

 Fixing the Fiat Ducato Adria Campervan Fridge

 Quite recently (May 2024) our fridge stopped working and I had to figure out how to fix it. It's powered from a choice of three sources.. 240 Volt AC mains, 12 Volts DC or gas and, since we've owned the van (from 2007), it's been plugged into a mains supply and quite naturally the fridge has been using that option. Not too surprising then, after 17 years of continuous use, that the mains option failed. Thinking about the reason... the heater whose task is to keep the gas-liquid refridgerant cycle running will have been turning on and off so somewhere in its construction metal fatigue probably eventually open-circuited the element.

I checked and found that suitable new elements were plentiful so bought one and fitted it. The fitting exercise was not straightforward as it meant deciding how to remove the old element and insert the new one. Not only swapping the actual element posed a problem.. but how the fridge fitted into the van needed to be figured out. The pictures below show how I managed.

 

One of the clues to fridge failure is the lack of waste heat leaking from the upper grille. When the fridge is working normally one should be able to feel a waft of warm air if you put your face near to it.

 

 

 

Removal of the fridge for repair involved several stages of dismantling. The first step having diagnosed the fault was to remove the exterior grilles. These were clipped into plastic frames secured with stainless steel screws. I found much better access after also removing the frames.

 

 

 

The second step was to detach all the electrical cables and the gas supply pipe. The cables are on the top and the gas supply pipe connection is at the bottom left looking from the rear. This was better accessed once the fridge had been slid forwards about six inches or so.

 

 

Limited access to the wiring was via a detachable panel in the floor of the wardrobe so I was able to test heater supplies and their continuity. In my case, as I'd expected, the mains heater proved to have failed requiring the removal of the fridge.

 

After a lot of puzzling I found a pair of fixing screws located behind the passenger seat. These were holding the fridge in place in conjunction with a kind of very messy black Bostik.

 

I was then able to shift the very heavy fridge and this picture shows it slid forward with its door removed.

 

 

 

  

 I identified the screw connectors holding the various cables which needed to be detached.

Basically these are the mains input, the battery supply and the thermostat wiring.

I made notes and took numerous pictures of how these were routed and to which choc-bloc terminals the cables connected.

 

 

 Below, after the gas pipe (bottom right) and the cables had been unscrewed, I pulled out the fridge and lifted it away to gain access to the heater assembly. I lifted it onto the adjacent seat, taking care not to get any Bostik on the seat material, and using the inspection panel from the wardrobe floor on which to rest the fridge on the seat.

 

 

  Here you can see the electric heater assembly.

There are two heaters within the heavily insulated metal sleeve. To gain access meant unclipping the outer sleeve and pulling away some of the insulation material, after which the mains heater was jiggled out. The battery powered heater, fed by the grey cable, was left in place.
 

 

 

 On the left is the open circuit heater and below is a picture of the replacement heating element.
 

 Fitting the new heater and refitting the fridge was fairly straightforward and it then worked normally.

 
 
 
 
 

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