dry camping with residential refrigerators

Ivylog wrote:

RJsfishin wrote:
Quote:

Don't even think about it !

Theres your straight answer

When you post that you have a 150W inverter and 2 12V batteries what might be a straight answer for you, is not for those of us with energy hog MHs. I have a 2000W inverter, a 1000W inverter, 10 batteries and a 10KW generator.

Having been of your opinion, it only cost me a couple thousand dollars wasted on my NoCold 1200 trying to keep it working before I gave up. Most trips out west we boondock 5-6 days/week so the idea of a residential refer was out of the question. After a year of actual use, no way will I ever have another absorption refer.

Yes, a Danforth compressor refer is very efficient but do you really want to spend $1000 for a 3.8 cuft unit that draws 3.75 amps. My $550, 21 cuft refer (5 times larger) draws 8 amps and this past summer it ran 40 percent of the time... a little over 900 W/day or 77 AH/day. The rest of my MH's power usage is close to 3 times that amount requiring close to 2 hours of generator use/day, way more than what's need to keep the refer's batteries up.

Thumbs up!

After almost a year I wouldn't go back to the Norcold for any reason. We find when running the genny for other things (maybe once or twice a day) it's enough to keep us in battery power for needs like the residential fridge. With four 6v batteries it's a non-issue for us during boondocking. In fairness we have 500w of solar too.

We avoided the change for some time before being forced into a decision, now we can't imagine why we waited. Everything we worried about isn't there.