Actually, there were 2 wins and one fail.

The fail was when Tony tripped over the fridge door.  The strip that holds the door panel in place to come apart and the panel slid down within the frame.  It was now scraping the floor as you open and close the fridge.

Naturally, this had to happen on a dark rainy night on a windy wharf in Quebec after a very long drive.  All we wanted to do at this point was go to sleep, so after a few futile attempts to fix it, we did just that.  We’ll deal with it in the morning.

The next morning, with better light, we could assess the situation and decided to take the door apart to try and fix this.

This is the piece that fell off.  When secured properly in place it prevents the door plate from sliding down, but we just weren’t able to slide it back in.

We needed to take the door off and turn it upside down.

We were then able to evaluate and insert the piece back like this:

It took a few tries, but success!

For those trying this task, here is how you would do it:

1. In order to pull the fridge out, you first have to unscrew the screws on each side of the fridge (ON THE CABINETS).
2. You will need to remove the top drawer to access the right hand side screw. The left one is accessible from the bedside.
3. Once this is done, open the door and unscrew the 2 screws on the fridge tabs on the floor. then pull out the fridge a couple of inches to access the top bolt. You may need to giggle the fridge a bit.
4. Once the top bracket is removed lift the door to pull it out from the bottom bracket (no screws).
5. Reverse this process to reinstall the door.

This was the second win.

The first win is the fridge itself.  When we bought the Banff, we thought that the fridge was rather small and won’t hold much.  We thought that we were compromising. We were wrong and really, we couldn’t be more impressed with the capacity.

By no stretch of the imagination can it come close to the capacity of your regular household fridge, but let’s be honest here, how much of the content of your fridge is just sitting there taking space?  How much gets thrown out?  Should it be thrown out?  How much of this fridge real estate do you really need?

Stocking your RV’s fridge for a trip takes a bit of planning.  It’s probably not a great idea to just go and fill up a shopping cart with stuff and hope for the best and space calculation should always be at the back of your head.  Since we were going for about 10 days and will be doing a lot of driving, we preferred to take cooked meals with us.

We made a few big batches of soup, roast, and chicken stew in the big Instant Pot and froze the individual meals in small Lock & Lock containers.  The containers fit nicely in the freezer; the rest went in the fridge in a frozen state.  We added a few containers of fried rice, coleslaw, sauces, condiments, fresh veggies, cheese, and eggs (not frozen).  Voila, we now had complete meals ready to serve with little handling for our entire trip.  We would just need to buy things like fresh bread a few times.

All in all, we were able fit about 20 containers (this may vary, depending on size and shape of course, but it can be a rough guideline). You can maximize the capacity of the freezer by using sturdy Ziploc bags instead, or in addition to the containers.  Just make sure when defrosting that they are still intact.

You can see that there is still  room in there for a some more food and as you consume some of the food and remove empty containers, you free up space for fresh food.

We keep the setting on the fridge around 3, but we needed to lower it a bit as the frozen food in the main fridge started freezing up the unfrozen food.  This can extend your batteries life when boondocking.  We bought very few groceries on this trip — mostly items of gluttony since we were in Quebec and they have such delicious cheeses, smoked meats and fish — most of these delicacies came home with us.

We only ate out once (most amazing tacos and Mexican fries) and we ended up returning home with a couple of the meals uneaten.  The frozen food that was in the main fridge compartment was still semi-frozen, so we know that the fridge is working really well.

If you had asked us before this exercise whether our fridge at home can hold full meals for two people for nine days, we would have hesitated before giving a firm answer.  If you had asked us whether the Carado Banff fridge can hold such a capacity, we would have answered right away with a resounding “no”.  After this fridge win…well, the answer is: definitely!

BY THE NUMBERS:

• fridge capacity: about 20 containers plus room for more
• number of days worth of food: 9 +

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