I’m trying to plan a small solar system and am trying to determine the feasibility of running a small 4-7 cuft fridge. I don’t know how much battery storage I actually need and the fridge seems to be the thing hardest to calculate because numbers are all over the place. Does anybody have any real life examples of how long your fridge would run on what AH of battery?
I have been looking to buy a retirement RV, either 5th wheel or motorhome. It is getting harder and harder to find RV’s with dual fuel refrigerators, they mostly are coming with consumer refrigerators that run on house batteries and inverters.
I have one and I’ll start this off by saying I didn’t install the system and do not know the technical details.
We have a DC fridge in our Ice Castle with a supplemental solar panel (roughly 18″x36″ mounted flat on the roof). I know the battery isn’t huge, but I remember it being a group 27, maybe a 29, standard lead acid) when I had the case opened.
We get roughly a half day of use out of it, which isn’t too impressive, but it’s “enough” for most of my needs (like loading the fridge at home, then driving somewhere).
Wish I had more information for you about amp draw, battery capacity, and solar capabilities, but as I said I didn’t install it and just run with what it came with.
Don’t forget that you can use the fridge as cooler for longer time periods. You can alternate freezing gallon jugs in the freezer and rotate them into the fridge (or if you’re ice fishing not even power the fridge and let nature freeze jugs for you)
I had the option of buying a propane fridge instead, but components take up a HUGE amount of space inside, so I went with the 12V.
Approximately the fridge would run 22 hours on a 200 ah battery. A 200 ah battery is large and you would need a lot of solar panels to make that amount of power per day somewhere in the 500-750 watts. Panels of that size will not be cheap. Now if you were not going to run the fridge consecutive days you would not need a panel that large.
We get roughly a half day of use out of it, which isn’t too impressive
Thanks, even though it’s… not encouraging 
I did, just now, remember that I have a small probably 3cuft fridge in my popup that I can do some tests with. I’ve never used it before so I forgot it was in there!
Just remember most refrigerators do not suggest to run them off of inverters because of the startup current needed to start the fridge. They do make rv fridges that have this design to help with this.
Approximately the fridge would run 22 hours on a 200 ah battery. A 200 ah battery is large and you would need a lot of solar panels to make that amount of power per day
That’s about what I’m finding scouring some other forums. I can fit up to 600w of panels easily but they wouldn’t be mounted optimally at all so it’s pretty much impossible for me to have an accurate idea of what my generation will be. The reason for the poor mounting is because my roof faces east/west. I’m planning on mounting them vertically on the south wall of the cabin. The calculators I’ve used make it seem not too bad to be vertical in northern MN but I definitely need to account for it not being full production.
I also plan using an all-in-one charger/inverter with dual inputs so I can plug in generator to charge the batteries and run things if the solar isn’t cutting it. If I have to top off from the generator every day though then the solar seems pointless, I could just invest in more batteries.
My goal is to be able to not use the generator for 3-4 days. If it can make it that long then, usually, I would be gone and it could recharge over several days with no load. The rare times I’m there longer I could top off with generator in the middle of the stay.
How about one of the e-coolers? Those probably give lower power output that a traditional refrigerator and are what all of the van dwellers and people boondocking in their setups use. Portable power like the Jackery paired with solar.
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