Dorm fridge

[Wavery]

If anyone has been thinking of installing a larger fridge in your TM, I have been doing a little experiment that some may be interested in.

The Norcold fridge in the TM is 2.7 cu ft. I may be replacing the Norcold with a 4.5 cu ft 110V dorm fridge/freezer. I bought a used Sanyo 4.5 cu ft mini fridge/freezer ($50) that will fit perfectly in the Norcold's place and have had the Sanyo mini fridge sitting on the floor in our TM running for a week now. It's running off of my batteries with an inverter. I have a 2000W pure sine wave inverter but it only needs a 400W (or smaller) pure sine wave inverter for the fridge.

I have been monitoring the electrical usage carefully in the system. The fridge is drawing <37W while running (it doesn't run full time). It draws about 150W at start-up for about 1-second. My best guess is that it draws about 50AH per day (max). My solar puts back about 80AH per (sunny) day (13A x 6hrs of full Sun) so I have a net gain of about 30AH per day that I can use for other devices.

I have a 200W solar array and the (225AH) batteries are fully charged by noon and stay that way until Sun down. When I check the voltage at 6:AM (after a full night of fridge running and a few lights on), it is still ~12.4V (under load).

We are going camping for 5-days in a couple weeks. I just turned off the fridge this morning and will turn it back on the night before we leave and report back the results.

We also run our microwave and electric coffee pot off of the inverter so I'm not removing the Norcold fridge until we are sure that it will all work out without having to purchase those expensive Lithium batteries.