12 volt Refrigerators

tewitt1949 wrote:
I had nothing but problems for 20 years with the OEM refrigerator. I finally threw it out and put a small house 120v fridge in. So much nicer since we are always have full hook up. We leave it closed until we get to where we are camping.

Comparing apples to oranges. Up until very recently all RV refrigerators have been absorption type, not compressor type. Home refrigerators have almost all been compressor type up until a few years ago. They were "old" style compressors that were either on at max cooling or off. (There were absorption type refrigerators made for household use years ago. As a kid it used to be my task to refill the kerosene tank on ours monthly.) Recent energy efficiency needs have made most home refrigerators inverter/compressor type which regulate the power needed to maintain temps and therefore CAN be much more energy efficient.

In the last year both Dometic and Norcold have introduced inverter compressor type refrigerators for RVs. Prior to that is was very difficult to find them for RVs, although there was a company in Australia making them, they weren't being imported to the US.

The 10 cu ft Norcold says it uses about 5amp, and from what I can tell the Dometic of the same size uses double that. There's not enough real world data on use in RVs to tell how they really stand up though, but it looks very promising for the future in the RV world. If they hold up and really operate on the stated power draws they'd work very well for dry camping with solar.

I do have an inverter/compressor "ice chest" that I've used for a couple of years in my RV. It has operated flawlessly and can freeze anything rock solid and keep it there with very little power draw.

BTW, the inverter/compressors used is sometimes referred to as Danfoss which is probably the company that did the original engineering. Most of the Danfoss units also appear to be manufactured in Japan.