whaase

I would strongly recommend at minimum you have the capacity for 600ah battery and the ability to charge these either with a generator or solar. We are in the process of upgrading we have put in 8 x 220ah batteries from Costco at $70 each with May 2014 stickers on them. We are putting on 1000 watts of solar right now and installing a 2812 Magnum inverter. We are getting ready to go more seriously on the comfort when boon docking and extending our time spent in the RV. We have a 2003 Fleetwood Southwind I love. Hubby would buy an Entegra DP in a heartbeat if he won the lottery, but we are more than happy with the space and floor plan we currently have.

Like I said feel free to email me direct if ever you wish to and no character limit like on this messages

Sorry haven't been active on here for while. Feel free to email me HelenWil@Telus.net as those come direct to apple toys www.Jackmayner.com has wonderful good information about solar and battery charging and being off grid.

I would strongly recommend at minimum for a residential fridge you have 600ah battery and the ability to charge with generator or solar. We are in the process of upgrading, installed 8 x 220ah batteries from Costco at $70 each with May 2014 stickers on them. We are putting on 1000 watts of solar right now and installing a 2812 Magnum inverter. We are getting ready to go more seriously on the comfort when boon docking and extending our time spent in the RV.

Our current 2 x 6V 225ah batteries with a small solar trickle has done us proud for many years by our being careful on usage. However, we intend to spend longer times dry camping/boondocking moving into the highlight of our twilight hopefully! I'm not sure we'll ever get the return on the solar full set up, but I am looking forward to having quiet electricity more on tap and a better for it's purpose fridge/freezer. Plus if we take the difference of a new residential fridge from the quoted new RV one and apply it, it's half the cost of the solar set up paid for nearly. Well if us non techy's can work out doing the install all ourselves for the most part!

We selected our fridge/freezer based on energy consumption guide and fitting the space available after removing our old Dometic. The latter being the main influence.

Generally speaking the typical propane ones don't tend to cool as efficiently as a typical electric residential one. Over the years you'll likely find the temperature worse on cooling with these older style two way RV fridges.

Finally ours just died and it was $4500 for new dometic quoted locally give or take. An amish reconditioned cooling unit was around $1400 with delivery, but we'd still have all the other components being 11+ years old as well still an inefficient cooling fridge basically.

We love to boon dock - detesting being crammed in tight commercial rv parks where I can hear the neighbours snoring at night. Whilst not imminent knew we'd need to look at a solar set up to make life a wee bit more comfortable and not annoying fellow rvers in the true boonies by running our generator.

Hi Whaase,

Welcome to the forums from a fellow Albertan (DeWinton). We've just had to replace our 11 year old Dometic Fridge, with a residential one, hence now we are on the pathway of more batteries (bought) and a solar system (huge learning curve) and I sit here wandering the past 3 weeks whilst waiting patiently for a friend of the family to finalize the reinforced bay for these new batteries and other components to follow, if we'll ever get out on the road again. LOL.

Anyway's welcome.