Upgrade to residential refrig - battery requirements

[wa6e]

I'm going to upgrade my Norcold to a Samsung residential refrig.  For those of you who have residential refrigerators, how many amp hours do you have in the battery bank and do you find it adequate to run the frig?  We do a lot of dry camping - obviously if we are plugged in this isn't an issue.  Is 400 Ah sufficient?  Thanks.

Gerry

07 Monaco

[hex_nut]

Gerry

I installed the Samsung 18cf Fridge with a 400ah AGM battery bank.  We do a lot of dry camping and this combination works great for us.  It takes approx. 3 hours of generator run time per day to recover what we draw from the batteries.  It was taking approx. 2 hours a day of gen time before I installed the residential fridge, so the fridge costs me an extra hour a day.  I recently upgraded my solar capability from 100 watts to 500 watts, but have not had an opportunity to find out how it will work out in boondocking applications.   

Richard

 

[Dr4Film]

I have four Sam's Club GC-2 batteries with 225 AH's each wired in series/parallel to form two sets of 12 VDC batteries giving me a total capacity of 450 AH's. However, I only can use 50% of that or 225 AH's safely before the battery bank needs to be fully charged back to Float SOC. This will give me the most life span that I can expect from this set of batteries.

My Samsung uses on average 1800 Watts of power every day when running. That equates to about 165 AH's required from my battery bank which includes a 10% loss factor for the Inverter. That leaves about 60 AH's left in the battery bank to run other stuff each day. Frankly it would be great to have 8 GC-2's which would give me 450 AH's of usable power but I don't have the room to install that many batteries. So for me it is what it is BUT it doesn't prevent me from dry camping for one nano-second. We usually have the generator running each morning to make coffee and use the microwave. Then I will run the generator again in the evening for a few hours to get the batteries back up to Float before retiring for the night. I always make sure to have everything not needed turned off except for the fridge so we can go through the night without the generator coming on automatically.

Another way to keep your house batteries recharged would be to fill up your roof with solar panels.

[6Wheels]

Before you buy a refrigerator look into this one - BRAND NEW

https://rv-pro.com/features/meet-the-new-dometic-dmc4101-12vdc-compressor-refrigerator/ 

Somewhere between $800-1200 too early to tell.

1 minute ago, 6Wheels said:

Before you buy a refrigerator look into this one - BRAND NEW

https://rv-pro.com/features/meet-the-new-dometic-dmc4101-12vdc-compressor-refrigerator/ 

Somewhere between $800-1200 too early to tell.

https://www.dometic.com/en-us/us/products/food-and-beverage/refrigerators/rv-refrigerators

[Pampero]

Interested thread;

Norcold and Furion also makes compressor refrigerators.

I have a 4 door refrigerator and I don't remember the model #, I will be interested on a 12 volt system instead of a house refrigerator.

 

[CTerry]

I installed a Samsung in place of the 1200 Not so Cold about 8 years ago in my 2003 Beaver. It had 4 six volt batteries. Plugged it in to hot all the time plug and have never had a problem. Will run all night if we are on the road stopped without power. The Samsung uses less power than the Norcold did on 12 Volt. Sleep a lot better not worrying about a fire all night.