Aha! Interesting, the appliance power usage table provided by Alfa in my manual puts it at 7amps. Wonder why?

 

Have no idea. I have never seen anything close to that on my meter. I normally just use my clamp meter and look for anything over 2.5. On the big four doors, you have two elements so you can double that depending on on the model. I have never seen a three-way four door fridge, but who knows.

Steve

 

The big, double door ones are very nice and lots of room.

 

Yes and ridiculously heavy when the cooling coil has to be replaced and they have to be pulled out and laid down on the floor.

 

We have a residential fridge and love it. It is a 21 CF double door with the freezer on the bottom. It works great. We do not boondock so I am sure that helps. We have a 1,000 watt inverter, (4) 6 volt batteries and 320 watts of solar.

Enjoy the road. We do.

bigdon68

 

I think you will see an increasing move to residential fridges. The reality is darn few folks boondock and all it takes is a small inverter and a couple of batteries to handle the load for a few hours on the road.

Steve

 

Especially with the arrival (finally!) of inverter compressors in the refrigerators. I'm beginning to see some LG fridges with inverter compressors in Travel trailers. They begin to approach the wattages suitable for boondocking. Now if we can convince the RV industry to move to inverter compressor ACs we will really be happy. They would be ideal for RVs on solar. My son built a tiny house that is run completely off 1000 watt array of solar panels including AC! Granted it's better insulated than most trailers but he has a 28 foot long (32 foot equivalent in a travel trailer) that he makes an ice box with a 9000 btu inverter AC. A 15000 btu unit would cool a fair size fifth wheel if properly built. And are they ever quiet!

 

hwheeler, this inverter compressor technology is new to me. I have been doing a basic amount of reading on the subject and it seems promising.

 

Washing machines have been using them for a few years now and are giving 10 year warranties on them

 

The inverter technology has been around for years, my blower motor in my heat pump has it and has been trouble free for 17 years.

Just to eliminate any confusion there are to types of inverter compressors, one uses a inverter mounted to a standard compressor and converts DC to AC to run the compressor. The drawback for this style is the DC voltage drop and amp draw limits the compressor size so they are only in smaller units, for bigger compressors you will mount a larger inverter close to the batteries and run a AC line to the compressor.

The second style is a compressor has a inverter that converts AC to DC and then converts it back to a alternating current but it varies the frequency to control compressor speed, in refrigerators the compressor speed is controlled by a temperature controller. I haven't read where you can put DC directly to the compressor, it has to be AC at this time but I may be wrong. If you can put DC directly into one you still have the voltage drop problem with a DC line feeding it.

Denny