How much propane does your fridge use?
We keep our trailer in storage about 7 miles from home and emptying the fridge and refilling it for each trip seemed to be something I could get around. I went ahead and bought a 100W solar panel and ...
Forum Discussion
wrybread wrote:
The holy grail would be a fridge that could run on solar while the sun is up and propane at night... Now that we have cheap high wattage panels and MPPT charge controllers we're easily generating enough power from RV solar arrays. With a bit of intelligence it could over cool in the day and only kick on at night if the temp goes super high. Ice cream trucks for example run their freezers only at night and go all day without boosting.
Wouldn't a standard domestic compressor fridge, an inverter, and a sufficiently large battery bank accomplish this without even resorting to propane at night? The future (at least that part of it) is here already.
There's no inherent reason why an absorption cooling unit couldn't be made to work directly on solar energy (by heating the boiler with a solar collector), without involving any electricity. I don't know that I've heard of anyone who's actually done it, but the technology to be able to is simple enough.
