Installing the RV AC Silencer
If the sound your RV’s air conditioner makes is making it unbearable, we met a man who has solved this problem. Many of us who have an RV air conditioner find ourselves thinking about ways to make them quieter. We can’t discuss this with our fellow occupants of our RVs because it’s nearly impossible to shout over some of these units they’re so loud.
Okay, maybe that’s just in my RV.
At the most recent FMCA Convention I ran into Darryl Abts, the inventor of an RV Air Conditioner Silencer. The company, Wack-O Products, claims installing this RV gadget is very easy and provides quieter operation as well as better filtration.
I had actually already come across the RV AC Silencer before as James and Steph from The Fit RV did a review of it and I was interested in the product from the start.
How it works
Essentially most ducted RV AC units work the same way. They draw air in through a cheap foam filter and then blow it out through the ductwork in the ceiling of your RV. In many cases if you can see the bottom of the AC unit itself then you can hear the thing too.
The filters are so cheap on these that they almost do nothing and many people don’t bother cleaning them as it is. I’ve taken enough RVs in on trade to say the majority of owners never clean them but maybe that’s just the majority of owners who traded with me. Who knows.
Essentially the way this unit works is to have the intake for the AC on the opposite side of the AC unit from where it typically is which forces the air through an “L” channel and past some insulation and sound deadening material. There is really nothing complicated about this including the installation process.
Installing the RV AC Silencer
What you do is take off the plastic cover on the bottom of your AC unit, which is held in with a few screws, and then replace it with the Wack-O RV AC silencer.
That silencer not only has some sound deadening material but also has a vastly superior filter to the one the AC likely has now so there is more than one benefit to facilitating this change.
We were fortunate in that Darryl Abts was able to install our unit for us as he was interested in the ceiling of our RV. Rockwood uses an arched ceiling and Darryl wanted to check the fit and installation.
Wack-O
Why is the company called Wack-O? Speaking with the owner, apparently he had the idea for the product and was sharing it around the campfire one night and was encouraged by his friends to make it. But he indicated that people would be crazy to buy a product from him.
Considering that he solves a problem and makes his product here in the US, I don’t think he’s so Wack-O after all.
The price for the kit is $189.00 and comes with everything you’ll need to perform the installation.
Will this work on your RV AC?
I wasn’t able to use it in our previous Rockwood, but it does here as this new Mini Lite features a ducted AC system. There are also systems that are built into some large RVs that don’t have a replaceable shroud, so you can’t install these.
But for the vast majority of towable RVs the Wack-O RV AC Silencer will not only fit, but will make a dramatic difference.
In the case of our RV air conditioner, it wasn’t exceptionally loud. But the AC silencer did drop the number of decibels measured with a cell phone by four.
But the even bigger improvement was to the performance of the air conditioner itself. We noticed much more air flow and a better performance of the system after the RV AC Silencer was installed. This improved performance alone would be worth having the Silencer, to me, although having the system run more quietly and the better filtration are just icing on the cake.
