Episode 206 – Unlocking the Secrets of RV Air Conditioning: Expert Insights from GE

In staying on the road today, we're going to be discussing RV air conditioners. And I've arranged an interview with Will Troyer from General Electric, commonly known as ge.

He's going to answer the questions that you would be asking a parts guy or a service writer about buying an RV air conditioner. He's going to break it down in a way, though, that's going to make it a much different buying process.

He's going to open your eyes to things that you probably haven't heard or thought about before. In fact, at RV dealerships or repair centers, they probably don't even discuss these questions.

It's all about BTUs, what you can fit on the roof and make it work for your rv. Well, he's going to change your thinking on that. There's much more to it, but he's going to simplify it. Don't worry about it.

It's not going to be so complex. And it's not a sales pitch for General Electric either. It's for you to decide what brand air conditioner you want.

But Will's just going to lay out the facts for you. I'm Eric Stark. Welcome to the Smart rver podcast. If you'd rather be camping than sitting in a repair shop, then you're in the right place.

Every episode, I'll walk you through practical DIY maintenance repairs that will keep you on the road. So welcome to episode 206. So here we are. This interview with General electric is about 22 minutes long somewhere in there.

So we're just going to give the entire show to that rather than getting into quick tips or RV envy. We don't have the time for that, so we're gonna. Well, that sounded so bad. We don't have the time for that. Like, it's not important.

It's important, but we'll get pick up on that in episode 207 in a couple weeks. So here we have an interview with Will Treuer from General Electric.

It's not a sales pitch, it's just Will breaking down the questions that you would have when you're buying an RV air conditioner. So Will has a lot of experience. He's worked at Atwood Dometic. He's been in the RV industry for decades, and he knows his stuff. Very smart guy.

So let's just go ahead and give our attention to Will in the interview with General Electric. All right, Will, so let's just get right into this.

And question number one for you is, what do RVers misunderstand most about how An RV air conditioner works well, that's pretty easy.

And not to be too technical about it, but you're not actually cooling the air, you're removing heat. That's kind of the big thing you got to understand is like it's the heat load inside the RV that you're trying to remove.

So essentially through the refrigerant and the coil that's on the inside, we're pulling heat and humidity out. The humidity goes through the drains and the heat gets transferred out towards the outside coil and rejected on the outside coil.

So we're trying to remove all that heat energy inside of there to make you more comfortable as well as the, the humidity that's in the room.

All right, very good. So that was pretty simple. Now let me ask this question, kind of as a follow up.

Is there a realistic temperature drop RVers should expect from a properly working air conditioner?

Yeah, different manufacturers, you know, depending on their performance, are going to be a little bit different. I like to really focus on kind of the nerdy side of it.

We call Delta T, which is the differential in temperature between the air that's going into the air conditioner and the air that's coming out of the air conditioner.

Typically you'll see, I know with our products we'll see anything from 20 to 24, sometimes a little higher, depending on the conditions, degrees Fahrenheit, difference between the air going in. So if the air's 80 degrees going in, you're looking in the 50s coming out.

The reason why I mentioned that is because the air conditioner can only control its environment. The rest of the RV is what's adding to the heat.

And the things that we talked about earlier, that is going to have a big factor on how cool the air can get inside of the rv.

The air conditioner's ability, depending on the airflow and the, the differential temperature between those two, if it has too much heat load on the outside from poor insulation, direct sunlight, lots of windows, things like that, it's going to change the overall experience for the consumer. And it might not be the air conditioner's fault. We may just be asking too much of it.

Sometimes that is a popular question because it's, I think even people in the industry don't always understand the difference and how important that is. And like you mentioned, the insulation, the windows, all that ties into it. So those are things we, we can't forget about.

We got to remember that we're, when we're expecting everything out of that air conditioner, spit, ice, Cubes out might not happen. All right.

Airflow is a big deal, too. So, I mean, that's something like in an rv, once it's built, you can't exactly go back in there and re insulate the unit.

You know, a lot of people can. They'll put things in the windows to stop a lot of that heat transfer, making sure you're ducting inside of the unit.

If it is a ducted unit that's very open and clear and flows well. And that's going to help more than anything else a lot of times from. From the consumer's perspective.

Yeah.

You know, you kind of made me think there that when you're buying the rv, that's the time to make sure everything is right, because you can't go back and undo that. Like you said, it's like if you're not thinking, a lot of people will buy based on cold.

Well, I'm going to get one with an Arctic package because I'm going to be in cold weather. But that Arctic package is going to pay off in warmer weather, too, because the insulation is so much greater.

So that's going to help the air conditioner. So, yeah, it's. When you're buying the rv, those are the things to think about if you're buying a new rv and air conditioning is part of it.

All right, so what is a. Or why does an RV air conditioner struggle so much on really hot days?

So a lot of what you'll end up doing. Again, we talked already about the heat load that's coming from, you know, external sources, the sun, the hot air in the area.

You know, outside of that, the struggling that's going to happen is basically current. So the hotter it gets, you'll have a little bit of a diminishing return in BTU when it gets hotter.

So as things, you know, where, you know, you can have a unit that's running at a good capacity, it's 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you ramp it up to 115 degrees, you will have some diminishing capacity on, on the air conditioning side of things. But usually the current and the power consumption goes up quite a bit too, as well.

So people with inverters and battery systems and, you know, generators and things like that will be a little more concerned with that. Onshore, typically, you never have to worry about the energy consumption.

You're more worried about just being cold, and then it really falls back to heat load.

With that in mind, is it better to start cooling the RV earlier in the day before it gets heat soaked, if you will.

Yeah, I mean, you want. You're better off if you have the power availability. So let's make the assumption someone's plugged in.

If you have the power availability to run your air conditioners all day long, and the park's good with that, do that. Because once that unit gets heat soaked, all that heat gets in the soft goods in the walls, things like that in the beds and the mattresses.

It's going to be so much harder to get that out.

You may think it gets cold and gets satisfied at first, but it's going to constantly run because you're still pulling all the heat off of the inside of those soft goods and the structure of the unit. So you're better off just keeping it at a comfortable level and letting it run all day off grid.

People, they have a different decision to make based on what kind of energy they have available, so they may not have that opportunity.

A lot of times, if you're in a situation where the inside of the RV is much hotter than the outside of the RV and you're not worried about bringing in humidity, I would always turn on your roof vents, open up your windows, evacuate as much of that heat as you can before you start running the air conditioner. It'll just help bring the temperatures down a lot quicker.

Yeah, don't let that RV heat up. Right. With maintenance in mind, what should RV or RV owners do before they assume that the air conditioner is failing?

Typically, what a consumer is going to say, it's failing, it's not keeping up, or it's not cooling. They put their hand up next to it and it doesn't feel cold. Coils usually are the first thing that a consumer should be looking for.

Clean coils, clean filters, making sure the filter's clean, making sure the unit's not iced up. Most of them won't ice up anymore because we all have protection on the coils.

But if you have, like a mechanical control, you know, with the knobs that don't have freeze protection, those sometimes can ice up when the ice dam starts to build, essentially, it will block all the air, and it's kind of like a runaway train. So you may have to defrost the unit occasionally if you do get to a situation like that.

But keeping your coils clean, keeping your filters clean, that includes your inside coil and your outside coil.

Right now, we just got done with cottonwood season around here in Indiana, so most likely this weekend, gonna take the air conditioner condenser apart and clean out My coils, because I know they're full of cottonwood at this point and it's hurting the energy of my house.

So that's a big deal for, for, for the consumer to make sure that they're periodically either getting those cleaned or doing it themselves if they feel comfortable with getting on the roof.

That's the type of regular maintenance that an RV can, RV owner can do safely on their own. Or is that something that should be left up to a techn.

Look, you know, stock answer is going to be always consult a technician for these types of things. You know, there are sharp objects inside of there.

There's electrical components, there's things like that that, you know, the regular consumer needs to be aware of and could be a safety risk for them as well as getting on the roof. So we're not going to publicly tell people that they should do those things. But we know RVers get on the roofs themselves.

They do a lot of their own maintenance. They're very DIY oriented. I would say cleaning your coils is not a big deal for the consumer.

Making sure, you know, you've disconnected all power, you know, you're in a safe position to where you're not going to fall off the roof, Things like that. I mean, this is all up to the consumer and their, their abilities. But generally speaking, like, talk to your dealer, talk to your technician.

Have them do some periodic maintenance when they're, you know, you're going in for your seals or whatever, just have them get up there and pop the top on and check the coils. If they're, if they're relatively clean, you're good, you don't need to do a lot with them.

But if they're starting to get gummed up with dirt, debris and dust and, you know, pollen and whatever else, then they should start, you know, cleaning the coils out. There's a lot of good, commercially available, safe things to clean those coils out.

So that kind of leads into another thought. When an air conditioner is running, but it's not cooling, well, what should the RV owner check first? Is there something they can just go right to?

Typically in our world, making sure that there's adequate airflow is always a big deal.

So for them, I think, you know, if you're in your RV a lot, you kind of know the feel of the airflow, so you're going to know if something's wrong inside the sort of the box where it's installed, where your grill is, there's a divider. Many manufacturers do them different ways there's foam dividers, metal dividers that.

That needs to be in place because it needs to separate the inlet and the outlet. And sometimes those can become dislodged during transport or the tape or the seal or things like that fall off.

So checking that is something a consumer can do before they even go to a dealer or a technician is to make sure that that's still in place and it's doing its job because otherwise it's just going to start recirculating the cold air and, and the warm air back inside of that box and not put it out into the room where you really want it. So outside of that, I think, you know, what we'll do usually is look for a current and amperage units that may be failing.

Let's say they have a refrigerant leak for various reasons. The compressor will start to pull less and less current because there's less refrigerant in the unit.

And typically that's an indicator that there's a leak and there's a failing component inside of the sealed system, whether it's one of the coils or some of the tubing or something like that.

Yeah. So that kind of leads into this next thought. What are some of the signs or what can the signs be that the AC itself actually has a problem?

I think you probably touched on that a little bit. Yep.

Low amperage from where it was, you know, different size air conditioners are going to have a different nominal sort of current depending on the temperature. And again from earlier discussion, the current goes up and down with the outside temperature.

So the cooler it is, the less current you're going to draw. The hotter it is, the more current you're going to draw, it's working a lot harder. That's typically the.

An indicator that there's been some sort of issue with refrigerant loss. And then that would be probably the worst thing outside of any kind of mechanical things like compressors not running.

You would typically know when it's not running because a fan will pull 1 1/2 to 2amps, maybe 3amps on some people's units. And then, you know, the compressors usually in that anywhere from 7 to 10, 11amps, depending on the size of the unit.

You really gotta understand the manufacturer's nominal readings to know whether or not it's bad. And that's what a lot of the dealerships will be able to do.

But you as a consumer, if you start to see like, hey, when it was 70 degrees or 80 degrees, my unit was pulling 12amps and now when I run it, it's only pulling 8amps. That's a pretty good indicator that you've lost some, some charge in your refrigerant.

That definitely helps the consumer, the RVer out there. So now is there anything that an RVer would have to know about running an air conditioner on a generator or if they want to add a soft start to it.

So obviously off grid camping is, is become more and more popular as people went to state parks and rural kind of areas. So generators, solar inverter driven stuff has become super popular with fixed speed compressors.

So which is mostly what your traditional air conditioners have always been, whether they're basically on or off. Imagine it's like a car, you're sitting at a stoplight and you just put the gas to the floor and take off.

And that's essentially what happens with a compressor. So we call that locked rotor amps. That's the energy that it takes to get the motor to start to spin. Right.

So that only happens for a brief second milliseconds. Actually what that does to a generator typically that's not expecting it.

It will overload the generator and the generator will usually decouple or the transfer switch decouples or things like that.

Really used to see that as much with your mechanical type generators that you've seen for years and years with Onan and you know, maybe some of the old guys, but the newer inverter generators with eco modes and things like that, they'll actually idle down and run at a low RPM to save on noise and fuel and things like that. And that's actually not great for a big inrush current because it's not ready for it when, when the inrush comes in.

So typically people that run generators, when they go to fire their air conditioner, the generator stalls out and shuts down. If you could ever get it started. The generator is big enough to run all the air conditioners, but it's just not enough to get it started.

And that's usually where people turn to a soft start type application or object. There's a lot of brands out there. Some are better than the others we've. We had, we previously had a brand new that we sold.

I'm not going to name them, but we had a brand that we had sold through as a third party item that came through us subsequently had a recall in the units and stopped selling them. But there's a lot of brands out there and some work better than others. So do your research. We do actually.

I know this is a sales pitch, but we do, later this year we're going to have a in house designed unit that we're going to have available for spring of next year. So we're pretty excited about that. It works awesome.

It's designed to work directly with, with our profiles and, and our air conditioners that we build. So it's a very easy thing to put in for, even for a consumer if they feel comfortable with it. I'm gonna talk at all about how they work.

Sorry to step on you there. But real, real quick, I'll give you an overview.

Essentially what it does instead of that foot to the gas, we're feathering it in and we're gonna slow start this so it'll take the current and sort of chop it up. So instead of having a big peak and nothing, it stretches it out over a longer period of time so that we can slow start the compressor.

And it doesn't stall the generators usually or trip out an inverter.

Right, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

So when the RVER finally gets to that point where they, where they feel they need to replace their air conditioner, what should they know of before they go out and just buy one? Is there something that, a formula there that they should know or, you know, the questions they should ask?

A lot of it's, you know, people are going to look for what they can afford. A lot of times we do know that most replacements people are replacing like for like.

So if you have brand X fail, you typically are going to get another brand X to replace the unit. But people are more feature seeking now.

They're looking for not only advertised BTUs and sizes and things like that, but they're looking for whether they may want to go to a low profile to get a little more height clearance versus a standard height 13.9 inch. They're also looking for things like heat pumps which, you know, we could talk about another time.

But you know, one of the things we're really, really happy with this performance of the heat pumps and, and people are using their furnaces less and less because of, you know, the performance of, of what these things are capable of now. So from a BTU standpoint, it's a tough conversation to explain.

There isn't exactly a regulated, there isn't a regulation that states that how you have to advertise your btu. There's not a, there just isn't a standard for it for, for our market.

There is in residential standards and Department of Energy and things like that.

But in the RV setup there's not, it's a, it's a tough thing to explain to people why what btu it is because it does vary based on the conditions that the RV's in.

Whether you're working inside of a ducted unit, a non ducted unit, if you're 80 degrees or you're at 115 degrees out in the desert, these BTUs are all over the place because of all of those factors. Airflow, outside temperature, all those things.

So there's some manufacturers out there that have gotten a little egregious with the way they advertise btu. We don't do that.

Matter of fact, you really won't see BTU on any of our products on the, the rating label because for us there has to be a standard to rate that by for us to be able to legally claim that it's this. We know what they are, you know, and we know how ours stack up against the competition that are out there. And, and we know we do better.

So we just kind of like to say, look, let's just let the product hit the market, let our consumers enjoy how well it performs and, and the rest will take care of itself rather than going through a bunch of creative marketing and things like that.

So a lot of it's just features today, but you did bring up the BTU function and, and that's always a question. Does a, a bigger or higher BTU rating actually make the cooling better in an rv?

Well, I think where, where this industry kind of sometimes gets it wrong is we're trying to overdo the size of the air conditioners in the RVs. Because, you know, well, this one time when I was in the south, you know, the Southwest, it was super hot and we were too uncomfortable in there.

So now I want these two, the largest air conditioners I could possibly get on the unit.

And that may not always be the right thing because you, you know, you want to obviously get heat out of the unit, but you need to get the humidity out of the unit.

And I've seen situations where people put like a, a 15k type family unit on a, on a really small travel trailer and it's just too much air conditioner for that travel trailer. Number one, it pulls a lot of current that you might not want to do.

And then the other thing is when it comes on, it only runs for a short period of time and then turns itself back off. So you're not really conditioning the air, you're not Extracting the humidity that's inside of the air, it will still become kind of.

It'll be cool, but it'll be kind of clammy in there. And that's not really what the consumer wants. They want this comfortable air. A lot of people don't realize this. You know, you.

We think about the Southwest and the Southeast as, like, this humid box, and this is where the worst of it is. I'll tell you, even in the.

Even in the north, if you put enough people, a couple of kids and a couple of dogs in an RV and close the doors, the humans and the animals, they expel a lot of humidity inside of there, and it's almost worse than being in Florida. So removing. Removing humidity is one of the number one things that you're going to want out of an air conditioner and its ability to do that.

Okay, well, that's a great point. I like. I appreciate that. So we got one last question here. Will. This is it. This is the big one.

So if you could give RV owners one piece of advice to help keep their air conditioner or to help their air conditioner last longer and perform better, what would it be?

Routine inspections. Keep them clean, keep the coils clean. Make sure that it's operating the way it's supposed to. That includes ducting.

Like we talked about the divider that was inside of there earlier. Those are big keys. Outside of that, I'd really like to say be careful about a lot of the cleaning agents.

Be careful about a lot of atomizers and sprays and things that you use inside of these RVs, because a lot of those have, like, a lot of acidic properties into them, and they get sucked up inside of the air conditioning coils, and it's not good for those coils. I would just be careful and try to stay away from any kind of, like, acidic sort of sprays and Pine Sols and things like that.

Like, keep those away from your air conditioners. And honestly, they're not good for your home ACs either.

So probably a good lesson, like, to explain to people, because it can shorten the life of them and, you know, speed up corrosion and failure.

Yeah, that's a great point. Never really thought about that. Especially in an rv, spraying that stuff in there, so very small space.

So it's going to easily go up into the air conditioner and work its way through that system.

It's good to name Pine Sol directly. I have no offense against Pine Sol, but don't spray it on your air conditioner.

The product bashing up to me, right? Hey, I appreciate it, man. This has been great. And I'm going to take you up on the heat pump offer.

We'll come back to that in another interview and we'll just focus on heat pumps and we'll do that down the road. I made a note of that, so that'd be a great another one because heat pumps are huge today. All right, Will, I appreciate it.

So we'll be talking to you soon. Thanks for stopping by today.

All right, thank you.

Wasn't that a great interview? You know, we really appreciate the answers Will had.

It should probably change how you buy an air conditioning now and even help someone, you know, that's going to buy an air conditioner to get in there and ask the right questions and hopefully the store will be able to answer them. My experience is it's generally just an air conditioner is like buying a bottle of toilet chemical.

A little bit of an explanation and the purchase is made. And it really shouldn't be that way. I know it's going to change how we sell air conditioners in my store.

We're going to do a little bit different now. And we appreciate that information because, you know, we've been doing it for a long time and I think we just get into a rut. This is what you need.

We go with that. So it was an eye opener, I guess you could say, for me and hopefully for you on how to make that right purchase.

So as a reminder, check out our website, the smartrverver.com you know, we have do it yourself articles there. We have links to just about everything we do. Our store, our online store.

You're looking for something, if you want to contact me, you got the information right there. So the smartarver.com is a wealth of information, information. It certainly comes in handy, if not anything else.

It's got my phone number on there and you can call me anytime with a question. All right, that's going to do it for today's episode of the Smart rver podcast. Thanks for listening.

I'm Eric Stark, and if you'd rather be camping than sitting repair shop, you're in the right place. Until next time, take care of the little things and enjoy the trip.