Dometic or residential refrigerator?

The pluses and minuses.

Residential refrigerators do a better job of maintaining temperature in hot weather. An ice maker is a realistic option !

RV refrigerators give you the freedom to camp without electricity. If you frequently camp without electric hookup, residential refrigerator are probably NOT for you. You would likely need FOUR 6V golf cart batteries and a large solar set up or be willing to run a generator several hours per day.

Obviously a good quality pure sine wave inverter is required.

When driving, a simple parallel battery charging setup should run the inverter but it will NOT recharge your battery bank.

Dometic also makes an AC/DC compressor fridge that doesn't use propane. We got one in the store in the spring and ran it off a fully charged group 24 marine/RV battery for 40 hours. Draws about 8 ah. Fits in the hole where most of the 8 cu. ft. models go.

Clicky

I’ll throw in my two cents. I had Norcold not Dometic and replaced it with a residential about 4 years after I purchased my new coach. I boondock quite often and I did install 400 watts of solar, added two batteries to my existing four batteries, installed an automatic gen start and upgraded my inverter from msw to psw. All that cost around $4000, I did all the installations. Glad I did it because my fridge has larger capacity, it gets cold within 2 hrs and it’s dependable. The Norcold was ****.

I know very little, but will tell you why I chose an 8cf Dometic.

1. We are without power about half the time.

2 Gone with the Wynns has a video that he measured the amp hours used by a residential fridge. His would eat through 200 amp hours of battery in 6 hours. I wasn't interested in the expensive solar and batteries necessary to support this.

3. There is higher than typical negative comments about the 4 door, 12cf Dometic. It has the same cooling power as the smaller models and just can't seem to keep up with 12cf.