boondocking with residential refrigerator

[OC Bill]

We have a full size Res Refig running on the inverter when not hooked up to shore power.

We find that we have to run the Gen 3 hours a day to keep everything working OK.

We have a 2013 Palazzo 33.2 that only has 4 house batteries, but that seems to be sufficient to run all we need off the inverter.

The most we have done off power is 4 days, but I see no reason we couldn't go for much longer as long as we had fuel for Gen.

Bill

[Ernie Ekberg]

I was at Q for 12 days. I had a Whirlpool. I ran genny an hour in am, at noon, and right before I went to be. No problems at all.

[Sky_Boss]

I think there are some factors that need to be considered...

1. It appears that most residential refers use less electricity when actually running than RV refers. HOWEVER...they can't use LP. DUH! LOL I think it is not too far off topic for others with better data than what I have read. Anecdotally, my Samsung 197 doesn't spin the shore power meter as fast as my Norcold did. I think I shut down everything the same way for this unscientific test.

2. It also appears that residential refers are better insulated thus run less time for that reason alone.

3. Defrosting and ice making are controllable functions and can be shut off as needed.

We don't boondock a lot and when we do, it is overnight. We don't have any solar panels besides the little one that doesn't do much. When we replaced the Norcold 1201 with the Samsung we wired it to the inverter but are still running on 4 Lifeline AGM 6V batteries with 220 AH each. That should work out to a combined 440 AH @ 12V if I figure that out correctly. On 3 separate occasions we overnighted without using the genny and spent approximately 6-7 hours on batteries. On 2 occasions, running the refer, coach lights as needed, 2 fantastic fans, some time with an LED TV and a 2500W PSW inverter we started the stays at about 13.2V and dropped to about 12.8V by the end of it all. Take that all for what it is worth. On the other we ran the furnace a bit and dropped to about 12.6V.

I will be buying a Kill A Watt EZ soon to hopefully quantify the power use of some specific features like the refer and entertainment systems. The problem is that I don't know how to do that with that kind of device with systems that don't run off of a plug such as 12V lights nor do I know how to measure the power lost by simply running the inverter with or without a load.

In the end, unless I invest into a high end solar system with power monitoring devices I can only GUESS at the overall use of battery power and even a less reliable GUESS on that portion my refer uses. I have to rely on my anecdotal observations.

In the end, unless some of the hard core solar panel users chime in, I don't know that anyone can say with any specificity the impact of using a residential refer vs a standard RV type. The only thing that can be clearly stated is that RV types have the ability to run on LP if sufficient 110V electricity is not available.

Not sure I muddied the waters or not.