Saturday, Nov 17, 2007 at 23:26
Hi Greendog,
I have just been in the NT for the last month (bloooody hot 24 hrs a day) and my engel 40L was not performing as
well as it did on the east coast. I visted an engel service agent in
Darwin and he certainly knew his stuff. Here are my suggestions.
1) Defrost it first (just to eliminate this from the possible problems).
2) Charge your battery with a charger as suggested above.
3) If it is working on 240V but not 12V my bet is it is not getting enough current. As I found out - even though you might read 12.5V at the battery terminals and the fridge plug - you need to load test it. I used an 8amp load tester and it dropped to 10.5V which indicated a problem such as inadequate guage wiring, faulty plug etc (in my case a loose connection). The actual engel plug is far more robust than a cig plug.
The point above is that you need to test it under load - if you are handy with electronics, just grab a decent resistor and use it inline before the multimeter, or most engel service agents shoud be able to do a load test for you in about 30seconds.
You can also go to most auto stores or mechanics and they can load test your battery (just bear in mind they are testing high load cranking power - not what your fridge needs).
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Chris.
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