First Time Buyers - Help Wanted

Isaac-1 wrote:
First I would like to say that in my opinion residential refrigerators are NOT a good choice for boondocking as they either require massive amounts of solar panels, and a large battery bank with inverter and/or running your generator for hours each day to keep your food cold. By comparison an absorption refrigerator can run for months on a typical RV size tank of propane. Sure there is a trend toward installing residential refrigerators in RV's they hold much more food in the same footprint, and cost the same or less than an RV absorption refrigerator, which maybe great if you are moving from electrical hookup site to electrical hookup site and only need to run the generator to keep them going while on the road.

As to the hot / cold issues, the answer is yes, some models are better insulated than others, have dual pane windows, and some even have options for basement heaters and electrical heating pads to keep the water and waste tanks from freezing.

If a diesel is purchased a residential refrigerator will be a blessing as they generally have a an inverter and batteries that easily take care of a residential refrigerator. Posters on this site report the batteries are going 12-18 hours without charge. Most posters who replaced their rv refrigerator with a residential refrigerator have not looked back. Now a gas powered motorhome might be a different story.