Inverter to run outside fridge

wanderingaimlessly wrote:
The fridge wont be running all the time, so yes it's doable. But your power number seems low.
Get one of these Kill a watt or something similar and actually measure what the amps/watts are on start up so you don't buy too small an inverter.

To be clear, OP was wanting to use existing wiring to the fuse panel and or 10 ga wire.

None of that wiring will be able to support the startup surge of a highly inductive load from the fridge compressor.

As long as the OP uses a heavier wire and not the existing wire and they mount the inverter as close as possible to the batteries of course "it can work".

I am speaking from experience as I studied and worked through this problem for quite some time before I committed money to parts.

I HAVE measured my fridge running current AND the startup surges, while a small inverter on paper would look like it "should" work, it will not because of the surge current.

Others on this forum who faced this issue had also tried many small inverters from 300W to 500W.. Those small inverters all had issues with startup surge, general consensus has been around 700W inverters tend to have better results.. and the larger the inverter above 700W the better results you will get. That is why I recommend 1000W inverters for this job even though most of the time the fridge will be using less than 1/10th of the capacity of the inverter.

The difference in cost between a 500W inverter and a 1000W inverter are not all that great. Your talking often only about $60-$100 more for a 1000W inverter over a 500W inverter.

Fridge compressors are a very complex current device unlike say an incandescent light bulb. Incadescent lights pose nearly no surge current so you can run an inverter right near the max rating, fridge compressors however, not so much.