RV Appliance & 12V Electrical Repair in Sebring, Florida

Fridge running warm, furnace blowing cold, converter dead after a storm, batteries flat again: appliance failures are the daily bread of mobile RV repair, and all of it gets fixed at your site across Sebring and Highlands County. The honest headline: many “dead” appliances need a small part or a cleaning, not a replacement. Refrigerator repairs run $250 to $700, furnace repairs $200 to $800, converter and 12V work $150 to $900, and we always diagnose before quoting. Trip fee $75 to $150, full pricing here. Water heaters are covered under plumbing and water heater repair.

Refrigerators: what actually goes wrong here

Most rigs on the US 27 resorts carry a Norcold or Dometic absorption refrigerator, the classic two-way or three-way unit that cools by heating an ammonia solution and rejecting the heat out the back through a vent path in the sidewall. In Highlands County that vent path is the problem more often than the fridge is.

A suffocated vent path. Oak pollen in spring, mildew all summer, and mud daubers building in the warm, sheltered space behind the fridge. A condenser that cannot shed heat cannot cool, and a fridge that was fine in February falls behind in June. Cleaning the vent path and, on rigs that need it, adding a thermostatic condenser fan is the single most effective fridge repair in this county, and it is cheap.

Boards and igniters. A fridge that will not run on propane but works on shore power, or clicks and throws a fault code, is usually the igniter, the gas valve, or the control board. Boards are also a common casualty of a lightning surge, so if the fault code appeared the afternoon of a storm, we test for that first.

The electric element. Fine on gas, warm on 120V: the heating element on the electric side has failed. Routine.

The cooling unit itself. Ammonia smell, yellow residue at the burner, no cooling at all even at 70°F overnight. That is the end of the cooling unit, and it becomes a replace-the-cooling-unit-or-replace-the-fridge decision with two honest numbers. Full-timers who summer here often land on a residential compressor fridge conversion, a bigger job with real trade-offs (constant battery draw, an inverter) that we walk through without pushing. The Norcold and Dometic page covers what fails first on each, and the fridge not cooling page has the fifteen-minute check.

Furnaces: yes, you need one in Florida

Newcomers laugh until their first clear January night. Sebring’s January average low is around 49°F, and clear, still nights run colder than that on the lakes and in the low ground around Istokpoga. A rig with no furnace is a cold box by 3 a.m., and furnace calls cluster in December when units that sat idle since March are asked to work again.

The classic failure chain: blower runs, no heat, then shutdown. That is a sail switch that is not proving airflow, a dirty or failed igniter, or a gas-supply issue upstream. After a humid summer, add a mud dauber nest in the burner or exhaust and a corroded igniter electrode to the list. Furnace work is methodical, gas-adjacent diagnosis; repairs typically run $200 to $800.

Converters, batteries, and lightning

Everything in your rig ultimately leans on the 12V system, and in Highlands County two things attack it: lightning and storage.

Lightning. Florida recorded 305 lightning events per square mile in 2025, more than any other state. A strike near a resort’s electrical service sends a spike down every pedestal on the loop, and the converter, which sits between shore power and the battery bank, is the first thing it kills. The symptoms are dim lights on shore power, a battery bank that will not charge, and often a fridge or AC board that died the same afternoon. We carry a spare converter on the truck for exactly this reason, and we test the AC and fridge boards on the same visit so you get one number, not three surprises. An EMS-style surge protector between the pedestal and the rig is the cheapest insurance in this state, and we will say so every time.

Storage. A battery bank left flat in a storage lot from May to November sulfates, and a bank that spent six months on a converter with a failed charging stage is cooked the other way. Lead-acid batteries here rarely make the life on the sticker.

The trap most owners fall into: replacing dead batteries without testing the converter that charges them. A converter that over- or under-charges quietly ruins each new battery set, and the pattern is “my batteries only last a year,” repeated at $300 a round. We test the pair as a system: batteries under load, converter output at the terminals, plus the fuses, grounds, and connections in between. Converter replacement, battery swaps, corroded-connection repairs, fuse-panel faults, and lighting circuits are all standard truck-stock work, typically $150 to $900 with converter replacement at the top. If your slide-out has been acting weak, this is often the actual culprit; a heavy motor on a sagging battery fails in confusing ways. The batteries dead or not charging page has the voltage checks to run before you call.

The repair-vs-replace promise

Every appliance call ends with the same conversation: here is what failed, here is the repair number, here is the replacement number, here is what we would do in your seat. An older unit with a cheap fault is usually worth fixing. A unit at end of life with an expensive fault usually is not. What you will never get is a replacement quote before a diagnosis. The trip fee buys real testing, whether the rig is on a resort site in Avon Park, a fish camp in Lorida, or a driveway in Sebring.

Trip fee $75 to $150, labor $125 to $190/hr, one-hour minimum. The whole schedule is on the pricing page. Tell us the appliance, the symptom, whether a storm came through, the rig’s year, make, and model, and where it is parked, and we will bring the likely parts on the first trip. Common questions live in the FAQ.