It’s that time of year again. We’re loading up the RVs, heading out for the campsites. The first thing that I do, and I think a lot of people do, is you go out a little bit beforehand and you turn on the refrigerator. A typical RV absorption refrigerator, of course, takes a long time to get down to operating temperature. It isn’t like a compression type refrigerator like you have in a home. So, you can be looking at 10 or 12 hours on a warm day especially to get your fridge to operating temperature. If you’re running on electric, it burns up a little extra electric. If you’re running on propane, well, it uses up quite a bit of propane for those 12 hours while it’s struggling to get down there. There is an easier way to do it that saves you a little bit of time and saves you some propane. Typically, the day before I’m going to be loading up the RV, the first thing that I do is… put about three or four of these guys in the freezer at home. This is just a brick, as you can tell, not hermetically sealed, just a regular old brick. But I’ve got about three of these, and we’ll show you what they’re for out in the refrigerator, then. Pile them up here in the shopping bag. These things would feel pretty good on a hot day. So, let’s head out to the RV, and we’ll see what we do with these.

Okay, we’re out in the RV, got our bag of bricks. One of them goes up here in the freezer. The other two just get positioned somewhere in here in the refrigerator. And the idea with these, of course, is while the absorption mechanism is struggling to bring the fridge down to temperature, these bricks are like big chunks of ice. And they have enough thermal mass that they’ll hold that cold for a long time. So, you put–I usually put like three of them in here, three bricks here, one on the top, close it up, and it’s like– it’s like putting a bag of ice or something in there. All you’re doing is pre-cooling the refrigerator enough to help the mechanism bring it down to operating temperature. So, with the bricks in there, we turn it on, leave it on auto or gas as the case may be, and this works really well. It’ll bring the temperature down in way less time than it would be if you didn’t have them in there. One viewer told us about trying this, and her experience went from 10 or 12 hours down to 3 hours to get it down to 38 degrees. That’s not bad. So, check around outside your house, see if you got a brick or two to spare, maybe even a big round smooth river rock would do the trick. It’s a smart way to get the jump start on getting your fridge ready to go for a weekend. Yes, you do take the bricks out before you load the fridge with food and beverage of your choice.