dry camping with residential refrigerators

The straight answer is quite simple. If you plan to do a lot of dry camping then by all means get a traditional RV fridge, gas water heater and furnace. You CAN dry camp with a residential fridge, but you will need to invest in batteries, run the gen more than you want to, or invest in a solar farm or all of the above. For what?

When I read these posts about high electrical needs while dry camping, I just hope you are out in the middle of the boonies using your generator to fulfill those needs. If you are in a dry campground with other campers within earshot, I just wonder why you wouldn't want to minimize your electrical load which allows the area to remain on the quiet side.

jdhbounder wrote:
My friend recently purchased a new bounder motorhome and he says he has to run his generator at least 6 hours a day.

Need more specifics to comment if this is reasonable and common.
Please post how many batteries and what system is actually doing the charging.

Really need 4+ batteries and 80+ amps charging at 14.4+ volts.
And 500+ watts of solar would really help reduce generator time.

The OP indicates he is not familiar with high draws and high amp recharging while off grid, so he is jumping in off the deep end to get into this kind of game. It can be done of course, but "Be Prepared" as they say.

Stealing from my post in another thread:

"The fridge is a killer all by itself. Say 8 amps to run it (if a big fridge---my 3.2 cu ft electric one in the TC draws 4.5ish.) with 65% on time out of 24 hrs. That is 125 AH a day right there.

We use about 70AH a day in the 5er in summer, but that gets close to 200AH a day in winter with more lights-on time, more TV time, and way more furnace time, which can hit 100AH a day by itself if it is cold out (say 35-40F).

So in the 5er, I carry 6 batteries in the winter and four in the summer. Hate to think how it would work with a res fridge in the winter. 300AH a day? Out of the bank of 6 batts to 50% can do, so now to recharge every day back to 90%.

That is going to take some big amps of charging with a big generator and take at least 3 hours. (Takes me two hours and 15 minutes to restore 200 AH as a 50-90 using 150amp charger and a 3000w gen to run the chargers)

Don't forget when it is cold your bank's AH capacity is much reduced from as rated at 25C/77F, so you are already hurting for battery.

Hi,

If you are running the generator that much, make sure that the ice maker is off. This has a 300 watt electric heater that helps thaw the ice during each 3-5 minute harvest cycle. Not only that, the ice maker adds a lot of heat to the freezer.

With a few 100 - 150 watt solar panels, you can avoid much of that generator run time. I would not buy the factory solar systems, they seem to be marking them up by at least 100% more than they paid for the panels and controller.

Look at this website. SunElec.comp

Look for some 12 volt nominal panels, and in the 100 - 150 (175 watt+ gets really large width and length). and a PWM controller. You might need a 20 amp controller for each pair of panels. It is OK to have more than one controller. MPPT controllers seem to put out more amperage, but in reality, they do not make enough extra power to justify the extra cost.

I installed my solar panels in my new 1997 Bounder, running the wires down the back of the propane refrigerator, to the closet mounted controller, to the basement, and the batteries. I have a 415 watt system on my 30' Bounder.

Drilling holes into your brand new roof can be difficult - but in reality, it is pretty easy.

I would want at least 600 amp hours of battery storage, in large golf cart batteries.

Samsung refrigerators seem to be the best pick, for use with a inverter. I would also insist on a pure sine wave inverter/charger.

Good luck,

Fred.

we have a residential fridge,
we started with (2) house batteries, and it worked, fridge ran normal all night
charge the next day
but we now have (5) house batteries, same fridge, bigger TV, bigger PC, more hours of daily PC use

LP is very efficient for fridge use in that you get a long time from the amount of LP

but, the residential cools faster, is not finicky about level, and maintains freezing temps in HOT weather, and i can find gas for the generator more places than LP for an RV fridge

and IF i have too, i can turn it off for a few hours, it will cool down very quick when i turn it back on, an LP fridge won't do that, "cool quickly"

When I am camping off grid I have to run my 2KW generator for a minimum of three hours each morning to get my 50% depleted battery bank back up to its 90% charge state. We do this during breakfast each morning when allowed to run our generator. Most everywhere public we camp at here on the East side of the USA all seem to have generator run time restrictions. Never allowed after 8PM to 8AM during the night.

We had to plan out how big of a battery bank we needed to run the things we wanted to run off the batteries.

You would have to run your house fridge on an Power Inverter a few hours a day since it will not work from Propane or Battery to keep it from letting the food go bad on you. Also you would to have to develop a good plan to not open the doors very often...

Roy Ken

Big lesson learned by me (and others) is Don't Do It !!!

The electric fridge is relentless in drawing down the batts and you need lots of solar, a big battery bank, big amp charger, and big gen to run the big charger,just to keep up . Then the sun goes down every evening, but the fridge stays on. Then you have a few cloudy days in a row. Oops.

It is a nail-biter all the time to keep the fridge alive when off-grid. Takes away from the RV fun experience. Have a propane fridge, furnace, and water heater, and enjoy RVing like you should be able to.

IE, you can adjust your use of the microwave, TV, etc, as required if there isn't enough solar coming in, but you cannot adjust the fridge. It has to stay on, so now it is running your life, not you. :(