Waeco Fridge

Yes it will and the outside temperature will also play a role. Why would you want -18 ?

When you open the fridge in will increase in temp and then take a long time to get back down to -18.

With Kryovac facilities who would want to freeze anything...??

Wait for member no1 {nudie} to reply ,fridge guru par excelence , however basic refridgeration theory and some lateral thinking will give you the answer ,,the colder the object already frozen the longer to defrost , ergo the initial cool down will consume more power ,after that to maintain temp you will use NO more power at any given ambient than if you have a higher set temp , at -18 your goods act as a freeze bank ,at -3 goods are barely frozen and defrost in next to no time , a 50lt waeco uses the bd35 comp , would expect to use 45/50 amps per 24hrs set at -18 ,know for fact that our 80lt waeco with the bigger donk bd50 uses 64amp per 24hrs set on -18 ,, the only time that we used our 80 as all fridge set at 2/4 deg our power usage almost doubled to 115amps per 24hr.

When you remove the frozen food I assume you will replace it with fresh food that will need to freeze? If this is the case then you will use power to remove the heat from the new food. If you replace it with already frozen food (eg from the supermarket freezer) you still use some power but nowhere near as much.

Theoretically, in a full fridge, frozen food will remain below zero until it all melts and then the temp inside the fridge will rise. -3 however is probably not enough to have all of the food completely frozen due to salts and other things (ie it is not pure water that you're freezing) so it doesn't take much to melt it all and have the temp vary. In typical car fridges the insulation is not that good so the bigger the frozen lump inside is the longer it will take for the temp to rise and the lower the amount of power required to keep everything below zero.

If it's a freezer then where do you keep the drinks?

If you cryovac your meat you can easily get two weeks in the fridge, even longer if you freeze it before hand and run the Waeco on 3 lights which is around 0 deg. Stick the meat down the bottom of the fridge and on 3 lights it will take days before it's thawed out. I took some cryovaced meat up to Fraser for nearly 2 weeks that was first frozen, didn't use it, came home for a few days left the Waeco running, off on another trip for a week still didn't use it and cooked it up when I got home no problems.

Although I don't have the figures to back up my asumptions, I'msure a fridge set on -18 will use more power than set at say 0 degrees. I am sure that the energy consumed would have a direct relationship with the difference between the inside temparature and outside temparature. eg -18 in th fridge, 30 outside = 48 degrees difference, wheras 0 deg and 30 deg is only 30. this would be the case for equal fridge loads and temparatures already down at presets. to get a full fridge of 4 degree food down to -18 would take some time and energy.

Cheers Andrew