12V or 120V For Refrigerator

[RunnerDuck]

It's not a Black and Decker but it is a 400W inverter by "Fusion Power", probably the same Chinese manufacturer. I've used it in my van to power my refrigerator for a week and it worked just fine. All I'm going to use it for now is 120V in the cabin and galley which will probably never get used. We don't camp with much electrical stuff beyond a computer and charging cell phones which will all run off of the 12V USB ports I have.

Thanks for pointing it out though,

Ken

[JimGC]

It's not a Black and Decker but it is a 400W inverter by "Fusion Power", probably the same Chinese manufacturer. I've used it in my van to power my refrigerator for a week and it worked just fine. All I'm going to use it for now is 120V in the cabin and galley which will probably never get used. We don't camp with much electrical stuff beyond a computer and charging cell phones which will all run off of the 12V USB ports I have.

Thanks for pointing it out though,

Ken

Watch using modified sign wave inverters on sensitive equipment like computers, as they will/do cause microsurges that can damage your equipment. While it will run the system and the fridge can take the surges a bit better, it will better long term to go with a pure sine wave inverter.

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[JimGC]

I have a Dometic CF-50 12 Volt / 120 Volt refrigerator and I'm wondering what would be the most efficient, running it off a a 12 V to 120 V converter or straight off of 12 V. The spec sheet doesn't seem to distinguish between the power consumption from either source, it's always 7 AMP.

I'm getting ready to wire up my TD and just not sure if I should wire it up to always run off the converter or 120 V when on shore power and 12 V when on the battery or wire it up to always run 120 V off of the converter.

I install these all the time on boats and the unit is made to hook up to both, however, efficiency on 12v is considerably less. If you read the info from Norcold/Dometic they recommend prechilling via 120v prior to loading with prechilled contents. As to your wire size calculations - you must double the run length to size correctly (back & forth) - thus you need to size your run to 30' at 10amps (round up always). In that case you could use either 12/2 or 14/2 (I recommend the 12/2 in Anchor Marine grade wire (tinned copper)). Also, make sure you invest in the protection covers for your wiring blocks to keep errant/inadvertent contact issues from happening and use dielectric grease/heat shrink on all your contacts (trust me it's worth the effort). See my comments on the pure vs modified sine wave inverter...

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