12 volt Refrigerators

Reisender wrote:

ajriding wrote:
The

Never use a household refrigerator unless u plan to park permanently.

Why not.

The Danfoss compressors are just more efficient, and also they do not need a spike of electricity to start up, they have a slow-start process. It can be difficult for battery to provide enough surge of amps to the electric powered devices to get the compressor to moving.

These DC fridges are made specifically for the needs and to be used by DC power supply as on Jeeps or RVs. I think they first got popular in the off-road vehicle camping market (jeeps and other 4x4 trucks), but the RV market quickly jumped in too.

The DC fridges seem to have more adjustments aimed at conserving battery than a house fridge would.

Maybe there are some household fridges that are more efficient than other house fridges, but I doubt they beat the DC ones, and I would not be so fast to believe they are as good as the DC ones designed to conserve as much battery power as possible while camping. Also, with a house fridge you will have to use an inverter, which itself is not efficient in that it consumes power/ waste some power to do its thing, so you are wasting amps that could be better used.

In the end the DC fridge might be a little more expensive than that $100 walmark one,but so are your batteries. Running batteries low is what kills them, the less power you need the longer a life the battery will have.

My personal fridge is a 2-zone one. I can control the temp individually and even turn one side off. So, when boondocking and I use up all the frozen good I just turn off the higher-amp-draw freezer and run only one side as a fridge. This saves a lot of power compared to always running both fridge and freezer side. Some trips I do not even need the freezer so just use the one side.
If I do plug into shore then the fridge automatically switches over to the shoreline power instead of battery, so that is nicer than having to go turn off the inverter and switch some old house fridge over all the time.
IF i run Air Cond at night then I will not let the fridge use AC power so this saves gas as gen only holds enough gas to make it through the night (10-11 hours) just for AC, Fridge load would shorten this.

Also, if I would have pointed this out 12 months ago you would think Im kooky, but if SHTF then this DC powered fridge might make life a little easier than a household fridge... AND S did HTF in some places already, the World did not end, but S was flinging around the room for a time period.