Fishing with an Engel

Prob flatten battery, 6hrs on freeze you really need to be looking at a dual battery setup.

Also is engel only for freezing the fish? Whilst they are great freezers, it will take it longer than your home freezer to freeze a load of fish, which is fine if only fish in there.

if you have other frozen stuff in there and introduce 'warm' fish, it will tend to defrost your other stuff a bit before it catches up.

i have an engel and its great, but its definetly better at keeping frozen than freezing, especially large loads.

Also when you put a few fish in to freeze, its gonna run flat chat without cutting out for a few hours.

Might be inconvenient, but I'd be leaving it on 240 till you get a dual battery system.

Ron

If the fridge has been 'drawn down' to temperature, and it's not gonna be opened- pack some insulation around it (like a pillow)- keep it out of the direct sun & I'm sure 6 hours wouldn't be a problem.

A couple of points here Steve.
If you are keeping that many fish and you are out on the water for 4 to 6 hours, you need to carry an esky and ice to put the fish in when caught. That is too long for fish to be left out of cooling.

To run a fridge on freeze and be away from 240 V power for even moderate periods, I'd recommend a dual battery system. In an ideal situation, you might get away without it, but the real world is not ideal. If your Engel is a newer 40 litre model, Engel says they draw 2.5 Amps. Set on freeze during the day I reckon you have to base any calculations on the basis that the Engel will run full time (ie worst case). 6 hours x 2.5 Amps is 15 AH. If your vehicle battery is in excellent condition and always fully charged at the start of the 6 hour period, might be OK. But if you spend a couple more hours on the water, the battery is not fully charged or is a couple of years old, you might not be.

You could buy a cheap low voltage cut out. But while that might stop your battery from going flat, the Engel might cut out and get hot as a result.

In short, I'd be leaving the fridge connected to 240V or getting a dual battery system. I reckon for people with a fridge who camp more than a few times a year for a couple of days at a time, a dual battery system with good deep cycle battery is right up there in terms of priority.

I now carry two fridges. One a 70 litre combination fridge and freezer and the other a 40 litre Engel. I also have 330 AH of deep cycle battery power (all AGM) split between the vehicle and camper trailer and another 60 AH that I use to run the electric motor on the tinnie. You don't need that much, but we rarely have access to 240 V where we like to camp and fish.

By the way, we rarely keep more than a few fillets for the freezer. If we can't eat it today or tommorrow, we let it go. We just love the fishing. My wife caught her first ever barra (865mm) a couple of weeks ago. She reckons the thrill of letting it go was almost as good as the feeling of catching it. But that's just us. Pic of her with her barra in my rig profile.

We have taken an Engel as a camping fridge, then we we got fish, cranked it down to freeze to bring the catch home - BUT we chose to go to CP's with powered sites to keep the catch well frozen on the trip back. If you want to send a good catch home from a key fishing spot, you can use commercial freezer transport and storage.

With our present arrangement, the Engel runs off the aux battery in the Patrol, and stays on when the car is turned off. I haven't used it to bring fish home though; just as a fridge.

Like Norm I have two fridges, both 50 weacos and run one as a freezer. My setup runs of a second 75 amp AGM battery which I keep charged from either the car or from power. I find that I can park this way for a good period of time (not sure how long exactly) by having the car as cool as possible and having some frozer stuff in the freezer. We parked for a morning at Kakadu this way without a problem. I had a thermostat sitting on the top of the freezer to show me that it was always around -10 or thereabouts.

Our goal was to not have to move the fridge or freezer when travelling - too heavy.

Kind regards

I suppose if we look at this logically we would
1. Be arriving at the boat ramp in the morning with an engel containing frozen fish or whatever.
2. Being thermally quite efficient, if left all day with frozen contents and well covered from direct sunlight apart from ventilation needs for motor etc, the fridge would not be running continuously as some have inferred.
3. If power is a problem simply use a spare battery in the back of the Prado for day time power and recharge each night back at the campsite when mains becomes available.

KISS principal applies

As a general rule when using a fridge in this manner it is good advice to start the week off with prefrozen contents eg frozen water bottles and prefreeze the fridge at home before you set out. By removing the frozen water as the fish piles up, the prefrozen contents of the fridge will bring the fish down to temp a lot quicker than if thrown into an empty fridge set on freeze.

Thanks for all the great advice.

After reading all this I've just realised that the boat ramps are never far enough away to recharge the vehicle batteries, and we are often in one place for weeks at a time without doing much driving.

So the KISS approach makes a lot of sense—run off a separate battery while at the ramp and recharge it at night. And it will be easier to recharge a spare battery in the back of the vehicle than to keep disconnecting the main battery under the bonnet.

Also unlike a lot of 4WD's the Prado doesn't look like it has enough room under the bonnet for a second battery.

Steve

Id suggest that your fridge sitting in a hot car for 4-6hrs will suck the guts out of any duel or auxillary battery and also not a good security option!! Everyone knows that cars at boatramps are an easy target....most owners are out in their boats...hrs away.

I would be leaving it at the van park on 240V and enjoying the fishing without stress that your fridge will still be there and your Prado will start.

Enjoy!

Matt.

Sounds like you have a solution Steve. Your web site has you with the porta bote. Your initial post here says a tinne and fold up trailer. Do you now have both or have you changed over to the tinnie?

As you can see from my rig profile, we travel with a 12 ft tinnie, 15 HP outboard and fold up trailer. Also carry a 40lb elec motor. We looked at the Porta Botes and I went crabbing in one at Darwin with a bloke I met up there (he had the boat, I had the crab pots - a natural union).

We went with the tinnie mainly since we will do a lot of travel in the top end. A tinnie is bad enough up there amoungst the crocs. A Porta bote is may well be OK, but I don't think I'd get Kathryn into one with crocs around. Getting her in the tinnie is hard enough!

Something that hasn't been mentioned is the fact that a nice engel sitting in the back of a car would be the perfect target for scumbags to break into the car. I have been broken into a number of times and have never left a thing inside. I even use to leave the glovebox open so they could see there was nothing inside, but they would still smash a window. Now I just leave the car unlocked. Leave the engel back at the park!

cheers Tony

And also with the engel once the fridge is frozen you can drop the dial back to 4 so the fridge will cycle using less power

My sick sense of humour - I would fish with a rod and line as an Engel would be very hard to cast out in to the water. I would then use the Engel to keep the fish in.
Sorry but when I read the heading I had a mental picture of "Fishing with an Engel"
Cheers
The Bigfella