Power for fridge

Thanks Seadog,

Yes the fridge is a 40l Engel. I do not have a deep cycle battery yet but was thiking of maybe getting one and then placing it in a Sidewinder Flyer so there are ready made connection points for the fridge and some lighting. I intend to also buy some solar panels to keep the Flyer charged. Does this sound OK or are there cheaper ways to go about it.

Hello Glen

I recently did a trip to Perth and back from the Gold Coast using an Engel 40L fridge/freezer and also had two deep cycle batteries with me but I believe that one could do the trick quite easily. Those batteries were Waeco RAPS 36 a/h. I alternated them and recharged one each night from mains power via a 7 stage Projecta while the other ran the fridge i my car. This was probably overkill.

I am sure that you can run your fridge from your battery while driving and also recharge your deep cycle battery through cig lighter sockets without putting any undue strain on your car's electrical system. I've done this in the past and had no hassles. You won't quite get the depth of charge from your alternator that you would from a proper battery charger on 240 volts but you will certainly get enough.

What you put in your fridge also helps. The Engel 40L is a legend! I ran it on -1 degrees (about 2.3 on the dial). I put frozen cryovaced food on the bottom and built up from there. The frozen was still frozen 7 days later and my veggies at the top were nice and cold but still good and so was my beer. The most important thing is that my fridge was always full!

G'Day again Glen

Yeah you can go a cheaper setup than that if you like but again it is a bit of a personal choice.

Myself I have a dual battery set up in the landcruiser. I have two Supercharge allrounder batteries which from memory are 105a/h each and are a bit of a hybrid starter battery which will stand a fair drain on the battery without killing it.
I have a Waeco 80 fridge in the back of the car and have had that there since 2005. I have had the batteries in the car for years now and have used the aux battery until flat many many times and it seems to still hold a pretty good charge (no doubt no where near as good as when new though)

So for me it was the dual battery set up with a couple of good batteries and then running some nice thick twin cable to the back where the fridge is and to a power socket at the back to plug into. My car is old school and so is the battery set up but to be honest it has never let me down over heaps of camping trips and four wheeling.

If you are likely to park the car for days on end then the battery will drain and the solar would be great but most trips the car is used daily which puts the charge back into the battery.. if I think that there is not enough driving I might let the car idle for a while just to give the battery a quick hit too.

This is probably the cheapest in the way of no fuss set ups but of course you can have a seperate battery with solar recharge unit or portable charging generator etc. all horses for courses.

The benefit of having the in-car set up is that the car will charge a battery a lot faster than solar etc... but this will bring you back to deep cycle battery or AGM battery etc as the deep cycle will generally not like to be hard charged.

There is HEAPS of info on the web about which batteries people prefer but for mine I have the 105a/h and it has done the job pretty nicely for my needs.

Cheers

I agree with Kevin. You don't need to go to extremes (& costs) to run a fridge while on the move. Our fridge runs off 12V, 240V or gas. My wife & I travelled around Australia (over 20,000kms) in 1998 & all we did was had a 12V cigarette lighter socket installed in the rear of our car. The fridge was the last thing we packed into the car when leaving a camp spot & the first thing we unpacked upon arrival, ensuring access without fuss. So even the fact the fridge was near the back window (& in direct sunlight) wasn't an issue in keeping things cold. We never had any trouble with plugs falling out either.

^^ Yup!^^