Sometimes, propane is better at fueling frustration than a fridge

None of us expects all that much from our electric refrigerators — just to keep our frozen food frozen and our refrigerated food cool enough not to spoil. Usually, we take this for granted, but these simple tasks seem to be too much for the propane refrigerator that shares our home.

Since we decided to live off the grid when we moved to Cambria’s backcountry, we had to find ways to minimize our electricity consumption. Propane appliances were a given. In the nine years we’ve been in our house, we’ve never had trouble with any of our appliances, except our blankity-blank propane refrigerator.

For my entire life until now, and for most of the years I lived at home with my parents, I considered self-defrosting refrigerators the norm. Not so with propane refrigerators. With a propane fridge, you have to defrost the freezer and refrigerator sections about every six weeks. Fins on the back wall of the fridge collect copious amounts of frost pretty quickly. The good thing is that when you defrost so often, you always have a clean refrigerator. The bad thing is that the process is a half-day project. Can I just say that I hate my propane refrigerator? Defrosting once or twice a year, OK. Every six weeks, nuh-uh. Besides, with our fridge, defrosting isn’t the only problem. 

Since we received this refrigerator “jewel,” imported from an Amish man in Illinois who builds them from scratch, it has not worked properly. First the button you push to restart the pilot light after defrosting stopped working, so my husband, John, and I had to tag-team the system to get the pilot light relit. That meant one of us had to lie on the floor in front of the fridge to push and hold the restart button, and one of us had to lie on the floor behind the fridge to light the pilot light. Heaven help us if I needed to defrost when John wasn’t home. 

Then the cooling coils failed, so no matter what the pilot light mechanism was doing, the fridge wouldn’t cool, resulting in lots of spoiled food. After we installed a heart-stoppingly expensive new cooling element, shipped all the way from Illinois, the thermocouple (what the heck is that?) and thermostat failed. 

Finding a repair person to come up here to the middle of nowhere to fix the many things that keep going wrong with our propane fridge was a challenge. The only people we’ve found who would even give us the time of day are in Arroyo Grande — 1½  hours away. Over the past six months, their propane fridge guru has been up here three times, and we still have a fridge that isn’t working properly. Every time he fixes one thing, another part stops working.

Thanks to the generosity of our neighbors, allowing us to store some food in their fridge, and using our cooler for the rest, we got through several days right before Christmas when the fridge wouldn’t cool. Now, while we’re waiting for the new thermocouple and thermostat, we have to shove a peg of wood against the pilot-light start button to keep the pilot light on and the fridge running. The 

only problem with this temporary fix is that the fridge is either on and everything is in danger of freezing, or it’s off and everything is in danger of spoiling. 

Over the years, I have repeatedly threatened to push our propane refrigerator off a cliff and beef up our solar-panel array and battery bank so we can support a normal electric refrigerator; 2015 may be the year I finally make good on my threats.

This story was originally published January 7, 2015 at 12:13 PM with the headline "Sometimes, propane is better at fueling frustration than a fridge."